Coronavirus is exposing how deeply higher education has mortgaged its future to the international markets.
The University of Kent is planning waves of redundancies, starting with 150 this year. Kent is £60 million in deficit, and foresees an abrupt fall in its income from foreign students as a consequence of coronavirus. There are, for example, around 100,000 Chinese students at British universities, and some can pay as much as £40,000 a year in fees.
Sussex, anticipating a drastic loss of fee income, announced that “non-business critical” posts held by temporary or agency staff were to be axed and a recruitment freeze imposed.
• A longer version of this article is on the web at www.cpbml.org.uk.