Why is university struggling to make its sums add up?

Unions have criticised the University of Nottingham's spending on its new Castle Meadow Campus amid huge budget cuts

- By JOSHUA HARTLEY

THE 144-year-old University of Nottingham one of the city's most prestigious institutions - is currently fighting for its future.

The cash-stapped university suffered a £17 million loss in its most recent financial year, a figure that was not helped by £12.1 million in severance it paid to staff during a resignation scheme designed to cut rising costs.

The university announced in April that it planned to cut more than 300 job roles after bosses concluded that a £40 million planned reduction in spending would not be enough.

The Russell Group university plans to reduce professional service roles by 258 and remove 98 vacant posts in phase one of its Future Nottingham cost-cutting programme but more large-scale job cuts could follow.

Other universities, including Nottingham Trent University, are also making savings as inflation and a drop in international students bite.

But the wide-ranging UoN measures have been labelled “drastic” by unions fighting the job cuts.

So why the crisis?

Problems everywhere

The University of Nottingham is not alone in its rush to slash costs and cut jobs. Thousands of roles are being lost all over the UK’s higher education sector, with the universities of Sheffield, Newcastle and Durham all announcing hundreds of job cuts this year.

While there are specific issues at different universities, two main problems have combined to put serious strain on their finances nationwide. The primary cause of redundancies is an unsustainable funding model, according to Times Higher Education.

While tuition fees in England will increase to £9,535 this autumn, they had previously been frozen for eight years at £9,250. Inflation has increased and the real-terms value of the current fee income in 2012 prices, when fees were tripled to £9,000, is now around £6,000 per student.