Donate or universities will fall apart, says Oxford VC
Irene Tracey urges alumni to give back to struggling institutions with cash each year as ‘vote of confidence’
GRADUATES should donate to their universities every year, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford has said as she warned institutions face “falling to pieces” amid a funding crisis.
Prof Irene Tracey, 57, said the public has “got to get behind our British universities” and said people “should give back to them”.
In an interview with The Telegraph, she said: “I keep telling my kids, ‘give back to your universities’. And even if it’s £5 a year, it doesn’t matter. It’s a vote of confidence. Because they need it.”
Prof Tracey, a neuroscientist who was admitted as Oxford’s 273rd vice-chancellor a year ago, has three children, including graduates of University College London and Durham University.
She said the “only real surprise” she had in her post last year was the realisation of “just how difficult the financial challenges” were for the UK higher education sector. She revealed her worries about some universities being overdependent on international students.she said that Oxford is fortunate because the university is able to attract philanthropic donations, which totalled £222 million in the last academic year.
This has meant that the university’s leaders “have not, thankfully, been driven to a model where we are dependent financially on the international fee structure”.
Around a fifth of Oxford’s undergraduate students and two thirds of its graduate students are from overseas, and bring “amazing” insights, cultures and talent, Prof Tracey said. However, she recognised that some universities have become too dependent on them and said she worries this has created a “vulnerability in the system”.
Overseas students pay up to four times as much as British students, whose tuition fees have effectively been frozen at £9,250 since 2017. The Russell Group estimates that universities in England made an average loss of £2,500 for every home student they educated last year.
Earlier this month, Universities UK, a lobby group for the sector, warned that large numbers of institutions risked falling into financial deficit after a recent drop in international student numbers.
Some university leaders have said that the number of international students taking up places in recent months has been lower than expected, blaming the Government’s rhetoric and a clampdown on overseas students bringing family members to the UK.
Prof Tracey said: “You can see that most universities are making a loss on every student that they’re teaching, and that money has to come from somewhere. So where does it come from? It means you don’t refurb that lab, you don’t refurb that roof, you don’t refurb that building, and you just start falling to pieces. And that’s what you’re seeing, right?”
She said there needed to be a “national conversation” about what we want from our higher education system, how it is funded, what its purpose is and what the shape and size of it should be, because the system is “creaking”.
Prof Tracey also called for a debate on the future of A levels, because she believes that sixth form students have “the bandwidth to do more” than a small number of A level subjects.
In a world “more complex and data driven” she said that universities need to engage with school leaders about how to ensure the education system as a whole is “fit for purpose for what the world is now and going forwards”.
The Department for Education has been contacted for comment.
‘I tell my kids, ‘give back to your universities’. Even if it’s £5, it doesn’t matter. It’s a vote of confidence’