After the stimulus, the cuts are coming

EUA is calling on governments to commit to major investment in higher education and research and renew efforts to reach the target of investing 3 per cent of GDP on research and 2 per cent of GDP on higher education.

Public funding accounts for the majority of university income across Europe. EUA’s research shows there have been major cuts in Latvia of 48 per cent in 2009 and 18 per cent in 2010, cuts of between 5-10 per cent in Italy, Ireland, UK, Estonia, Lithuania and Romania and cuts of up to 5 per cent in the Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia and Serbia.

Elsewhere, governments have discarded commitments to increase higher education funding. In Hungary for example, the government has cancelled plans announced in 2007 to increase overall university funding, leaving universities with 15 per cent less than expected. In Belgium, a funding freeze has replaced a promised increase of approximately 10 per cent.

Only a small number of European governments have upheld their commitments or provided new investments to fund higher education. In Germany, where financing of higher education is mostly the responsibility of state authorities, the federal government has increased its investment, providing an additional €800 million to support growing student numbers until 2015. The government will also invest a further €2.7 billion from 2012 – 2015 in the German Excellence Initiative and provide a funding increase of 5 per cent per year until 2015 for the Innovation and Research Pact.

France has also increased its overall higher education funding, with a pledge to invest €30 billion in 2010 into key priority areas. From this amount, €11 billion will be invested to improve the overall quality of higher education, €8 billion will go to research while the remaining funds will go to upgrade university campuses.

The EUA has also collected evidence on the impact of the crisis on private funding for universities.

In some countries the economic crisis has sparked a debate on private contributions to higher education. Heated discussions are currently taking place on the introduction, or increase of, tuition fees to help universities reduce the funding gap. Changes are even occurring in the Nordic countries, where there was previously broad agreement among society and politicians that higher education should be exclusively publicly-funded. Finland, Sweden and Denmark have all started to introduce tuition fees at least for some programmes and/or will charge tuition to foreign students.

Although EUA’s monitoring showed no direct impact on current collaborative projects between universities and industry, individual accounts from Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland have highlighted some difficulties in starting new projects.

Furthermore, reports from charitable foundations, which offer another potential source of income for higher education institutions, show that their funding base has also been affected by the crisis.

There are indications, too, that the economic crisis has also had negative impacts on the development of university autonomy in certain countries. These include introducing more direct steering mechanisms, and regulations as well as unbalanced accountability procedures which the EUA believes will be counterproductive in making universities an essential player in overcoming the crisis.  

The UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has announced a package of £836 million worth of efficiency savings and in year savings to its spending.