Cardiff University plans to cut 400 jobs and axe courses

Cardiff University has confirmed plans to cut 400 full-time jobs amid a funding shortfall.
The cost-cutting proposals could also involve course closures, as well as department mergers, with nursing, music and modern languages among the subjects facing cuts.

Kinda worried what I'm going to do, as I already accepted them as my firm choice, but my course is on the list of the ones they plan to axe.

Cardiff University plans to cut 400 jobs and axe courses (bbc.co.uk)
The university has stated it has a £30 million deficit in its budget.
What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas as to what went wrong?
Cardiff is a Russell Group university - could other Russell Groups follow suit soon?
What do you think the university could have done instead?

Concerns about the impact of this from the Royal College of Nursing Wales. Reports that there are about 1000 nursing students at Cardiff at any one time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7ep0rx514o

Frankly bizarre that the government will underwrite a bank to prevent public harm, but not courses to provide healthcare staff.

Education (and health) are both devolved budgets. And Medr's (the regulatory body formerly known as HEFCW) budget has been cut to the bone

The University model has had structural problems for decades and were exposed by successive problems of dependency on foreign students (EU & International) and lack of proper investments by the Government.
I think there needs to be a fundamental rethink of the university system. Here are my suggestions:

An interesting mix of proposals from one of this debating forum's most creative and unorthodox thinkers!😉
These merit picking through one by one, but I'm interested in your proposal to abolish the salary threshold for repayment of student loans.
Two questions: why? And are you proposing that this measure be applied retrospectively?

Thank you for your kind words, you are by far too kind.
My motivation for calling for the ban on the salary threshold is two fold:
First, it is important that anyone who takes out a student loan should repay that loan irrespective of the degree or graduate prospects. This is because it is taxpayer-funded and abuses the system if many students are studying courses without the ability to repay the funds for future generations to enjoy similar opportunities and reduces the tax burden on the public.
If i recall correctly, there was a stat that i had read online which suggested about 1 in 3 up to 1 in 2 students may never fully repay their student loans. That’s ridiculous. If it was mortgage or other loans, it would be called a crisis, but the system allows students to take out loans without fully repaying them.
If one thinks that it is unfair because their course wont secure for them the appropriate earnings to do so, they should reconsider their degree options.
I do, however, advocate for a graduated level of fees as it is unreasonable for a student studying a subject like History of Art or in the Humanities to be expected to pay the same fees as one studying a STEM subject Advanced Computing or Medicine when both earning prospects are vastly different.
The second reason is ensure that more funds are returning to the Treasury to invest in the wider education system.
To your final question, no retrospective actions should take place as that would simply be unacceptable and could be akin to the Waspi women betrayal.

Thank you for that clarification. As usual, your arguments are thought provoking and carry much merit.
First let me say that I entirely agree that any changes should not be applied retrospectively as that would constitute a breach of faith, if not necessarily a breach of contract.
Here is a further argument in favour of abolishing the threshold.
Privilege does not always work in the way some TSR members suppose. For example - as you have pointed out so many times - families that use private schools are not always the privileged ones.
Consider two imaginary students, Jack and Jill.
Jack lives in a 3 bedroom semi-detached house with his mum, dad and younger sister. Dad earns £70,000 per annum but only after working many additional hours overtime. Mum earns £25,000 working in an office. Jack attends a private school because the local state-maintained schools have a very poor reputation. This costs his parents £12,000 a year, which they struggle to pay - even before the addition of VAT on school fees. They eschew expensive clothes, holidays and cars. Jack goes to university and takes out student loans. He eventually qualifies as a teacher and, after a few years, is on a salary of around £35,000. The school where he works is not in the area where he lives so he has to rent a flat costing £750 per month. He must repay his student loan (currently at the rate of £900) for up to 40 years.
Jill lives in a 7 bedroom villa with her mum and dad and younger brother. Dad is a partner in a law firm and his income is in the region of £150,000 per year. Mum is a full-time hospital consultant on a salary of £95,000. Jill attends the local comprehensive school, which is outstanding; there is no need to pay for a private school. Jill goes to university and takes out a student loan. Why not? She has no intention of paying it back. When Jill graduates in Law, she takes a part-time job working for a friend of her father for just two and a half days per week. The full-time equivalent salary is £45,000 but she earns £22,500 - below the threshold. Her father buys her a flat and a car and gives her £20,000 to put in a cash ISA (the interest from which is outside the Income Tax tax system and does not count towards her overall income). Two years later she marries a wealthy accountant and continues to work part-time. She will never repay her student loan.
The above example might sound far-fetched but I am aware of very similar circumstances in real life.
So where is the fairness?

There is no fairness in the system and this unfairness remains pervasive in our society. We make the rich to get richer whilst arguing about helping the poor.
I agree with your example with Jack & Jill and it forms part of a wider debate about the structural issues that exist within the education system.
I think the threshold should be abolished and I support the return of maintenance grants that would be means-tested. This way, we can have a more fairer system that supports students in real need.
How do you think the education system can be improved?
What do you think about the alternatives such as the Apprenticeship schemes?

To answer your last two questions would take a dozen or more threads!
However, the core issue in higher education is, as a friend of mine who is an Assistant Director of Education for a local authority put it, "We have too many universities but not enough higher education".
What he meant was that we have simply multiplied many times over the number of traditional three year honours degrees, albeit with (until now at least) an ever widening range of courses on offer.
The traditional, full-time three years honours degree is a benchmark of excellence, which was designed to serve an academic élite. It should only be one of several formats on offer in a mass participation HE system such as we have today.
Research has shown that young people place great value on university attendance and obtaining a degree through the traditional route.
"Students were very clear that they saw university as a way of securing a good career; it was not about money, it was about the right job. Many therefore planned to do courses designed to take them into a particular career. Sometimes they planned to choose “vocational” courses, other times just courses that would broadly position them for the careers they were interested in, while leaving their options open for the future. However, all degrees were felt to have currency in the labour market: to them, degree courses undertaken at university have a status that could not be matched....
While our research revealed that students had some awareness of other study options, they were overwhelmingly focused on full-time degrees. Any reforms or new routes within post-18 education must therefore be backed up by strong communications and be supported and respected by students, parents and employers."
https://universityappg.co.uk/resources/reports/university-worth-it-young-peoples-motivations-aspirations-and-views-student
Two of the most common motivations for going to university were career oriented:
But wanting to be "better educated" and studying a subject they love were also major pull factors (41% and 39% respectively.
There was certainly resistance to either part-time study (88% against) and, at the time that this research was carried out, only 25% of respondents were interested in degree apprenticeships.
However, unpublished research with which I am familiar suggests that this resistance is born of a perception that anything other than three year honours degrees would be regarded by employers and wider society as low status and "second best". That perception may well diminish if and when other formats for study enter the mainstream and if the costs of taking a full-time degree over three consecutive years rises inexorably.
So yes, the degree apprenticeship and blended full-time, part time and online routes need to become more of the norm, while preserving the "gold standard" of the three year honours degree for those who have the academic ability to benefit from them - possibly aided by introducing a modern version of State Scholarships for our most able students.
In the meantime, your suggestion of raising tuition fees substantially to £12,000 or more is probably the best, short-term "sticking plaster" solution. As for the threshold, it has already been lowered for Plan 5 students, is frozen until 2027 and - given this and the previous Government's appetite for freezing thresholds - may not actually be increased when the time comes.
We are already seeing painful cuts and course closures but we need to be careful about the idea of shutting down the less well known universities altogether, as these are often highly valued by students who want to reduce costs by studying locally while living at home. The answer here is to have rationalisation and mergers rather than too many closures and to have fewer separate awarding bodies so as to reinforce academic credibility.

Your points are fair.
I think there needs to be a root and branch reform of the sector to ensure that value is extracted. Although i agree with fee caps, I think £12,000 should be considered or even higher for certain courses. It makes no sense for a student studying a mickey mouse degree to be paying £9,000 alongside another student studying a top degree like medicine. To me, there needs to be a stratified approach where students pay for the intrinsic and extrinsic value of their degrees
The above should also come in place with capping of the wages of senior staff as it makes no sense that top administrators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds even higher than the Prime Minister.
Overall, the education system would remain the same way unless there are real changes.