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The vast majority of UK unis are charities, which means they're non-profit and are funded by tuition fees and national council funding. The tuition fees have been capped for several years now, meaning unis are increasingly relying on foreign students to make up £££, and accepting higher numbers of lower-quality UK students. Also worth noting the vice-chancellors and principals makes hundreds of thousands per year. That's a hell of a lot to pay someone for charity work. Their salaries go up well-beyond inflation while they expect the rest of us to suck it up.
You're right there's a difference between a surplus and a profit, but that doesn't change the fact that £3bn in surplus is a lot - a 10% pay rise for lecturers would only take up about 1/3 of that. You also sound like if they don't reinvest that they won't be able to have a library and the gym weight room will have no equipment in it. That's not where the vast majority of new investment goes - it goes into expansion - more buildings to take on more low-quality students to make more money.
The department I'm in has expanded from about 100 students to 270 in the last twelve years, so I know all about grinding out larger class sizes already. The numbers get higher every year and the quality of the students goes down. We're teaching more dumb kids now than ever. I'm not saying that to degrade them, but it's just a fact that a lot of them don't really belong in uni. But if they've got £9k then the uni wants them almost no matter how bad they are and if they're a foreign student with £30k they can get in while barely speaking English, and certainly not being able to write it.
The system is broken because of low investment by the gov't since 2010 (shocking from the Tories, I know), and in a way it's not the unis' fault. However, they want to cut corners on staff costs to stay competitive with each other, not so they can make the students' lives better, whereas if the raises go in across the country, there'd be no change to how competitive they are with each other.
The change in UK uni model from central to tuition-based funding means the students are increasingly treated as customers who need to be pleased at every turn. That often means adopting policies that aren't in the students' best interests, but makes them happier "customers," like fewer and easier assessments and lower entry standards (as mentioned) and lower academic quality standards leading to grade inflation. A lot of students might feel happy they can graduate with a 2:1 instead of the 2:2 they would have received ten years ago, but it's hard to argue that's in their best interests, never mind the best interests of the company that ends up hiring them.
The unis' reaction to the strike also reveals their lack of interest in students, other than as a commodity. The attempt to bypass the marking and assessment boycott and to graduate students without marks is comical, unless you're a student whose degree won't be recognized by anyone if you want to go on to postgrad education.
Whether the union expects 10% and nothing less, or would settle for a smaller number like 5% (which seems more likely since demands are almost always above expectations in these disputes), the fact is that the unis are sticking to their 2% offer and refusing to even negotiate. So yeah, they can fuck off as far as I'm concerned, and most of my colleagues feel the same way.
Or more precisely, the gov't who is underfunding them. I get that times are tough, but they are happy to give money to their rich mates, but not to doctors, nurses, teachers, lecturers, ambulance drivers, etc.. The sooner they're out on their ass the sooner the country can start to recover from their reign of shit.
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