If you are starting university this autumn, you are entering a sector wracked by a widespread funding crisis. Universities across Britain are cutting jobs, closing courses and reducing student support.
A Universities UK survey of 48 university finance directors earlier this year found that 79 per cent had pursued voluntary redundancies during the previous three years and 44 per cent had closed courses. Twenty-seven per cent had cut bursaries and scholarships, 13 per cent hardship funding and 31 per cent academic research.
Even Universities UK chief executive Vivienne Stern has warned that course closures and staff redundancies ‘cannot continue to be the only solution’ to universities’ financial problems.
Students are already seeing the results: fewer staff, reduced module choices, larger classes and cuts to services. At the same time, the cost of studying continues to rise. In 2026, 65 per cent of full-time undergraduates were doing paid work during term, averaging nearly 14 hours a week.
Cuts to libraries, hardship funds, disability support and teaching time fall especially hard on students who are already combining study with jobs, long commutes or caring responsibilities. Fighting university cuts therefore also means fighting for adequate maintenance grants, affordable housing and properly funded support services.
At Goldsmiths in London, UCU members have been fighting the university’s £22 million cuts programme, £20 million of it originally due to come from staffing. A marking and assessment boycott was met with 100 per cent deductions from the pay of participating staff.
The union escalated to indefinite strike action on 8 June. By September, members were approaching their fourth month on strike. Goldsmiths UCU has described the restructuring programme as an ‘existential threat to the institution’.
The funding model
The immediate crisis has been decades in the making.
Labour introduced tuition fees in 1998. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition raised the maximum fee in England to £9,000 in 2012 while withdrawing most direct public funding for undergraduate teaching.
Universities were encouraged to expand, borrow, build and compete with one another for students. Overseas students became especially important because their fees are not capped in the same way as those of home undergraduates.
As costs rose and recruitment became less predictable, universities increasingly relied on expanding student numbers to keep the system going. When that income falls short, managements cut jobs, courses and services.
The Labour government has retained that model. For 2026–27, the maximum standard undergraduate fee in England has risen to £9,790, with another rise to £10,050 already scheduled for 2027–28.
Students are therefore being asked to take on still more debt while universities continue hacking away at the range and quality of education provision.
The situation varies across Britain. Eligible Scottish-domiciled undergraduates studying in Scotland have their tuition fees paid by the Scottish Government. Wales has its own funding arrangements. But what is common across the UK is universities’ dependence on competition for students, grants and commercial income.
Tinkering with fees won’t change that. Universities need stable public funding for teaching and research instead of being locked into a market in student numbers.
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Who controls the money?
Where university managements propose cuts, workers and students should demand access to the accounts, borrowing agreements, major contracts and financial plans. They should know how much is being spent on senior management, consultants and building projects, and what conditions banks and other lenders have imposed.
Addressing the incontinent spending by uni bosses on salaries and prestige buildings would be a start. But ultimately universities are operating inside a funding system created by successive governments.
Stopping the cuts therefore requires public money. Emergency funding should prevent redundancies and course closures now, followed by a permanent system of public grants covering the actual costs of teaching and research.
Public funding should also come with a transfer of power. Budgets, staffing, course provision and major institutional partnerships should be decided by elected bodies of university workers and students, whose representatives can be recalled.
That means more than a few token staff or student representatives sitting on committees where the real power and decisions remain in management hands. Workers and students should be able to inspect the finances, reject cuts and decide how university resources are used.
Universities are already made to serve interests outside education. Home Office rules require institutions sponsoring international students to monitor their immigration status and academic engagement and to report specified changes to UK Visas and Immigration.
Military involvement is also expanding. In July the Ministry of Defence launched a Defence Universities Alliance bringing together the armed forces and 35 universities to develop defence-related research, technology and skills.
Meanwhile, the Palestine solidarity encampments have put university investments and institutional partnerships under scrutiny on campuses across the country. Students and workers should demand full disclosure of investments and research contracts, oppose restrictions on protest and organisation and challenge universities’ role in immigration enforcement.
Organise locally, coordinate nationally
The start of the academic year gives campaigns a chance to reach thousands of new students through freshers’ fairs, lectures, halls and societies.
Where cuts are threatened, students and workers should organise open meetings involving the campus unions, affected departments and student societies. Campaign committees should be elected and accountable to regular meetings rather than restricted to student union officers or small groups of activists.
Students should support university workers taking industrial action, including joining picket lines and raising strike funds. Campus unions should in turn support student campaigns over fees, rents, maintenance support and university services.
Petitions, motions and negotiations all have their place. Where management refuses to retreat, campaigns also need the capacity to organise walkouts, occupations and other collective action alongside workers’ strikes.
Those fights cannot remain isolated campus by campus. In August, activists from around two dozen universities met in Sheffield to establish a national anti-cuts campaign. Campus campaigns should participate, send delegates and coordinate action around common demands.
The recognised university unions—UCU, Unison, Unite and others—also need a national fight against redundancies and course closures rather than a succession of separate disputes at individual institutions.
There is already widespread resistance. UCU members have fought cuts and redundancies from Dundee and Sheffield to Goldsmiths, Exeter, Glasgow and elsewhere. A coordinated campaign could combine those disputes into pressure on both university employers and the government.
Another education is possible
Stopping individual redundancies and course closures is the immediate task. But the funding crisis will continue producing new rounds of cuts until the system itself changes.
We fight for free education, living maintenance grants and cancellation of student debt, alongside secure employment, decent pay and manageable workloads for education workers and an end to casualisation and outsourcing.
Universities, colleges, adult education and schools should form part of a publicly funded National Education Service, free throughout life and controlled by the people who work and study in it.
Education would then be planned according to social need rather than according to which courses can attract enough fee income. That means funding science, technology and vocational education as well as history, languages, literature, art and other subjects that universities routinely put on the chopping block when budgets are cut.
Providing that system ultimately requires much greater control over society’s resources. Workers Power argues for public ownership of the banks and major industries under workers’ control and a democratically planned economy based on social need rather than private profit.
