Dundee is famous as the city of “jute, jame and journalism” but may have achieved notoriety after the near insolvency of its university and the very public bail out from public funds. The Beano and Dandy were popular comics produced here but a leadership that seemed to act like Lord Snooty and his Pals ended up looking more like Desperate Dan and Roger the Dodger. What is interesting is that Interim Vice Chancellor Professor Shane O’Neill is on the record as saying, “Reliance on international tuition fees is the main reason for Dundee’s financial crisis. It devastated our income.”
Perhaps that makes it unsurprising that pathway provider Oxford International Education Group appears to have taken the decision to excise details of the performance of its operation at the university in the accounts for the year to August 2024. Parent company Sparrowhawk 2 Limited, which is a subsidiary of German private equity investor THI Holdings GmbH, is only too pleased to tell us that new partners, Edinburgh Napier University and University of Kent, launched in 2023/24 are “generating significant revenues”. But then you dig a little deeper and you find that the reticence about performance of individual operations goes even deeper.
The 2023/24 annual accounts for embedded University Partnerships – Bradford International College, Greenwich International College, Bangor International College, Kent International College and Edinburgh Napier – have been similarly obfuscated. I have no doubt it is allowable but it’s really not very helpful and when people hide things they used to share it makes one wonder why. The one remaining example of transparency – De Montfort University (LIPC) may give us a clue about the reasons.
Basically, the graph showing turnover suggests that 2022/23 saw an extraordinary surge in terms of recruitment with a very sharp correction then happening in 2023/24. Any defender of the higher education sector surely has to query whether De Montfort University, the ultimate beneficiary of progressing students, was aware of and/or supportive of this growth? Even more importantly, did they build future expectations of similar numbers of progressing students into their financial forecasts?
Meanwhile, at Dundee, there is a way of approximating what might have happened. I always hold any leads or comments confidentially but I am grateful to colleagues who raised the possibility. It makes for a revealing picture.
The March 2024 QAA Review Report of ICD (International College Dundee) tells us that enrollment rose gradually from 41 in 2017/18 to 152 in 2021/22. Numbers then more than doubled to 318 in 2022/23. At the time of the review the number enrolled was 70. It seems likely that most, if not all, of the enrollment for the year was complete.
If that is correct, ICD was down around 150 students year on year. This would have meant that a similar number were gone from the pipeline to the university and that ICD’s operating profit/loss may have been similar to 2019 (a loss of £281k). I would, of course, be happy to be corrected on any of this by an authoritative source prepared to share and verify definitive numbers.
With so many UK universities having pathway partners it seems possible that many institutions are not paying sufficient attention to the possibility of progression numbers being met. Commercial pathway operators are likely to be at least as gung-ho as universities about their recruitment but if institutions are blithely building those numbers into revenue forecasts there is significant risk. It seems unlikely that this risk will decline as the Government focuses ever more intently on student visas.
NOTES
- The City of Dundee’s motto is “Prudentia et Candore” which translates to “With thought and purity”. Extraordinarily for a city of 148,000 people it has it has two professional football clubs Dundee United and Dundee Football Club. United reached the final of the UEFA Cup in 1987.
- The Beano and The Dandy are almost impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t seen them. I can only recommend getting hold of some back copies and being appropriately delighted or appalled.
- As noted, I would be happy to have (in confidence) a discussion with anybody able to provide definitive alternative data on any issues raised. If there is a reasonable cause for correction I will carry it as an update in this blog.
Image by Davie Bicker from Pixabay