A critical analysis of Dr. Albert Schram's landmark paper on governance failure, executive insulation, and financial unsustainability in Welsh universities
There is a particular cruelty to an institution that asks its lowest-paid workers to sacrifice their livelihoods while its highest-paid leaders remain untouched. It is a dynamic most people associate with failing corporations—not with universities, which are supposed to embody a higher set of values around public service, knowledge creation, and collective endeavour. Yet that is precisely the dynamic now playing out across the higher education sector in Wales, and a devastating new analysis by Dr. Albert Schram makes it impossible to look away.
Published on 22 March 2026, The Structural Collapse of Welsh Higher Education: A Crisis of Governance, Executive Accountability, and Financial Sustainability is not a polemic written from the margins. It is a meticulously sourced, data-driven account of a sector that has been allowed to drift toward insolvency through a toxic combination of political neglect, executive self-interest, and governance structures that have failed in their most fundamental duty: holding power to account (Schram, 2026). The paper draws on institutional financial reports, redundancy trackers, government data, regulatory documents, and media investigations to construct a picture that is as comprehensive as it is alarming.
The Numbers Behind the Crisis
The headline figures alone should be enough to trigger an emergency response. Welsh universities recorded a combined deficit of approximately £77 million at the start of the 2024/25 academic year—a figure that has since ballooned to an estimated £110 million aggregated across the eight major institutions (Hughes, 2026). This is not a temporary dip caused by a single external shock. It is the culmination of a decade-long erosion of the sector's financial foundations, driven by a domestic tuition fee that has been effectively frozen in real terms since 2012.
Capped at £9,000 for over a decade, and increased only marginally to £9,535 for 2025/26, domestic tuition fees have lost roughly 26% of their real-terms value (Fazackerley, 2025). The consequence is stark: universities now lose money, on average, on every domestic student they enrol (Nation.Cymru, 2026a). For years, this structural deficit was masked by a cross-subsidy model that relied on the high fees paid by international students. That model has now collapsed. Changes to UK Home Office visa policies, specifically the restriction on dependants accompanying international students, have caused applications to plummet (Fazackerley, 2025). At the University of South Wales, international student fee income dropped from £56 million to £38 million in a single year—a loss of nearly a third, exposing just how fragile the institutional business model had become (Hughes, 2026).
At the same time, costs have been driven relentlessly upward by external policy decisions over which universities have no control. The UK Government's 2024 budgetary changes to Employer National Insurance Contributions are estimated to cost the Welsh higher education sector between £19.7 million and £20 million annually (Sherlock, 2025). Increases in Teachers' Pension Scheme contributions have added a further £6 million (Sherlock, 2025). Unlike the school and further education sectors, Welsh universities have received no additional public funding to compensate for these specific burdens. They have been left to absorb the costs through reserve depletion or, increasingly, through the mass dismissal of staff.
A Sector Hollowed Out
And the dismissals have been staggering in scale. Schram's paper tracks the cuts institution by institution, and the cumulative picture is one of a sector being hollowed out in real time. Cardiff University, Wales's sole Russell Group member and its most prestigious research institution, initially placed 1,800 academic staff at risk of redundancy in early 2025 (Cardiff UCU, 2025). By mid-year, 151 full-time equivalent academic roles had been confirmed lost through voluntary severance, with plans to cut a total of 400 academic posts—approximately 10% of the academic workforce—by 2030 (Nation.Cymru, 2026a). In late 2025, the university issued formal Section 188 notices to over 1,100 professional services staff, placing at least 41% of the total university workforce at risk of redundancy in a single year (Cardiff Student Media, 2026). The restructuring programme, branded with the grimly Orwellian title "Academic Futures," has led to the withdrawal of degree programmes in Nursing, Music, Modern Languages, Religion and Theology, and Ancient History (Scripps, 2025).
The pattern is repeated across the sector. At the University of South Wales, approximately 490 jobs have been lost cumulatively between 2024 and 2026, with a new round of 200 cuts announced in March 2026 (Nation.Cymru, 2026b; The Tab, 2026c). At Swansea, 400 staff left via voluntary redundancy in 2025, followed by a further proposal placing 204 academic staff at risk (Nation.Cymru, 2026c). Bangor has lost over 250 members of staff (North Wales Chronicle, 2026). Aberystwyth is targeting 200 job eliminations, representing an 8% to 11% reduction in total staff, and has axed its entire postgraduate teaching course (QMUCU, 2026). The University of Wales Trinity Saint David has stopped offering undergraduate degrees at its historic Lampeter campus—a site that has been home to higher education since 1822 (Scripps, 2025).
These are not abstract numbers. Each one represents a researcher who will not complete their next project, a lecturer whose students will be redistributed among already overburdened colleagues, a professional staff member whose institutional knowledge walks out the door and never returns. Schram's paper quotes reports of staff being left "shell-shocked and in tears," and of academics being told that to keep their jobs they should prepare to teach at transnational campuses in Kazakhstan (Scripps, 2025). For full disclosure, a case in point is my batchmate in the European University Institute’s doctoral program, Dr. Stefan Halikowski Smith, who was unlawfully dismissed last year, and was never given any proper legal representation.
The human cost is enormous, and the paper rightly identifies a "looming workload and mental health crisis" among those who remain (Cardiff Student Media, 2026).
The Executive Paradox
What makes the crisis so politically and morally explosive, however, is not the funding shortfall itself—difficult as it is—but the behaviour of the executive class that has presided over it. This is the central argument of Schram's paper, and it is the one that should provoke the most serious reflection among policymakers, governors, and regulators.
While hundreds of staff are being made redundant to close deficits, the salaries of Vice-Chancellors and senior executives have remained largely insulated—and in some cases have continued to rise (The Tab, 2026a). At Cardiff University, the Vice-Chancellor's total remuneration stood at £364,000 in 2024/25, a figure that was 7.2 times that of the average staff member, against an institutional deficit of between £33.4 million and £45 million (The Tab, 2026a; Hughes, 2026). At Swansea, the Vice-Chancellor's base salary was £336,000 against a deficit of £40 million (Swansea University, 2025; Hughes, 2026). Furthermore, the number of staff earning over £100,000 at Cardiff rose to 185 even as a massive redundancy programme costing £24 million was being implemented (Nation.Cymru, 2026d).
Schram highlights a proposal, advanced by students and critics, that a modest 15% to 25% pay cut for those earning over £100,000 could save the jobs of approximately 50 lecturers (Nation.Cymru, 2026e). No governance board has adopted such a measure. The paper frames this not merely as a question of optics but as a fundamental failure of governance: boards that are supposed to serve as a check on executive power have instead become captured by the very leadership they are meant to oversee (Akhtar, 2026). Governing bodies are accused of "poor financial judgment," including over-borrowing for "vanity" capital projects designed to attract students in an increasingly saturated market (North Wales Chronicle, 2026).
The case of Bangor University is particularly illustrative. The university's UCU branch passed a vote of no confidence in the Vice-Chancellor and Chief Finance Officer after it was revealed that £1.4 million of emergency Welsh Government funding—intended to support the sector during the crisis—was spent on "unplanned, non-essential infrastructure" instead of protecting jobs (North Wales Chronicle, 2026). Whether or not the spending was technically compliant with funding conditions, the decision to prioritize physical infrastructure over human capital during a redundancy wave represents, as Schram argues, a clear moral and strategic failure.
The £500 Million Contradiction
Perhaps the most damning element of the paper, however, is its analysis of the Welsh Government's own role in the crisis. Schram documents a staggering funding leakage: of the £1.15 billion spent annually by the Welsh Government on student support, over £500 million goes to supporting Welsh students who study at universities outside of Wales—many of them at mid-tariff English institutions that are not demonstrably better than the options available within Wales (Nation.Cymru, 2026a). The proportion of student support flowing outside the country has more than doubled in four years, rising from 21.4% in 2019/20 to 45.2% in 2022/23 (Nation.Cymru, 2026a).
The Welsh Government's position that there is "no more money" for the nation's universities sits in direct contradiction with this reality. The system is not underfunded in absolute terms; it is misdirected. Welsh public money is effectively subsidising the English higher education sector while Welsh institutions are being starved into contraction. The "Diamond-era divergence," as Schram terms it, has incentivised a brain drain and a fiscal outflow that Wales can no longer afford to sustain (Sherlock, 2025). And despite the generous maintenance packages that the system provides, students from poorer backgrounds in Wales are still less likely to enter university than their counterparts in England, while young men in Wales have the lowest university participation rate in the UK (The Tab, 2025a). The policy is failing on its own terms.
What Must Change
Schram's proposed remedies are proportionate to the scale of the crisis. He calls for an independent forensic audit of executive decisions and pay across all Welsh universities, conducted by a body with the power to compel testimony—such as a Senedd committee or Audit Wales (Audit Wales, 2025). He proposes mandatory caps on executive pay linked to institutional financial performance and staff retention, and the introduction of clawback mechanisms for performance-related bonuses where strategic failures have led to structural deficits (Akhtar, 2026). He argues for an immediate suspension of compulsory redundancies, funded by repatriating a portion of the £500 million currently leaking to English institutions (Nation.Cymru, 2026a). He calls for Medr, the new Commission for Tertiary Education and Research, to move beyond "proactive dialogue" and use its statutory intervention powers to mandate a national strategy for subject provision—preventing the "subject deserts" that the British Academy has warned are already emerging as institutions cut departments in isolation (British Academy, 2025).
Most fundamentally, he calls for the re-democratisation of university governance: reconstituting boards so that elected staff, students, and community representatives hold at least 50% of voting power, and mandating the public release of all board minutes, financial risk registers, and executive performance assessments (Akhtar, 2026; British Academy, 2025).
An Existential Moment
The Welsh Affairs Committee has described this as an "existential moment" for Welsh universities (Welsh Affairs Committee, 2026). Schram's paper makes clear why that language is not hyperbole. What is at stake is not merely the financial viability of a handful of institutions but the intellectual infrastructure of a nation—the research base, the subject breadth, the cultural capacity, and the civic mission that universities exist to serve. A Wales without strong universities is a Wales diminished in every dimension that matters: economically, socially, and culturally.
The status quo is not an option. The question is whether the political will exists to act before the damage becomes irreversible. Dr. Schram's paper provides the evidence base and the roadmap. What remains to be seen is whether anyone in a position of power is prepared to use it.
References
Akhtar, S. (2026). Submission No 23: Inquiry into New South Wales university sector. NSW Parliament. https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/lcdocs/submissions/92456/0023%20Shumi%20Akhtar.pdf
Audit Wales. (2025). Annual plan 2025–26. https://www.audit.wales/sites/default/files/publications/annual-plan-2025-26_english.pdf
British Academy. (2025). British Academy response to Medr's consultation on a new regulatory system (including conditions of registration and funding). https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/5835/British_Academy_response_to_Medrs_consultation_on_a_new_regulatory_system.pdf
Cardiff Student Media. (2026). Cardiff University concedes on job cuts as the UCU vows to continue action. Gair Rhydd. https://cardiffstudentmedia.co.uk/gairrhydd/news/cardiff-university-concedes-on-job-cuts-as-the-ucu-vows-to-continue-action/
Cardiff UCU. (2025). Academic Futures: Restructuring and cuts in 2025–2026. https://www.cardiffucu.org.uk/academic-futures-restructuring-and-cuts-in-2025-2026-2/
Fazackerley, A. (2025, January 28). Cardiff University to cut 400 staff and drop subjects including nursing and music. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jan/28/cardiff-university-cut-staff-drop-subjects-including-nursing-and-music
Hughes, D. (2026). The financial crisis facing Welsh universities. Business Live. https://www.business-live.co.uk/opinion-analysis/financial-crisis-facing-welsh-universities-33410786
Nation.Cymru. (2026a). Yes there is a way out of the crisis currently enveloping Welsh universities. Nation.Cymru.
Nation.Cymru. (2026b). University of South Wales announces 200 job cuts. Nation.Cymru. https://nation.cymru/news/university-of-south-wales-announces-200-job-cuts/
Nation.Cymru. (2026c). Plaid Cymru MS calls for "urgent action" to protect the higher education sector in Wales. Nation.Cymru. https://nation.cymru/news/plaid-cymru-ms-calls-for-urgent-action-to-protect-the-higher-education-sector-in-wales/
Nation.Cymru. (2026d). University's redundancy programme cost more than £24m. Nation.Cymru. https://nation.cymru/news/universitys-redundancy-programme-cost-more-than-24m/
Nation.Cymru. (2026e). Students call for pay cuts for top earners at Cardiff University. Nation.Cymru. https://nation.cymru/news/students-call-for-pay-cuts-for-top-earners-at-cardiff-university/
North Wales Chronicle. (2026). Union planning formal industrial action at Bangor University. North Wales Chronicle. https://www.northwaleschronicle.co.uk/news/25489311.union-planning-formal-industrial-action-bangor-university/
QMUCU. (2026). UK HE shrinking. https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/
Schram, A. (2026, March 22). The structural collapse of Welsh higher education: A crisis of governance, executive accountability, and financial sustainability. [INSERT URL]
Scripps, J. (2025, March 12). Jobs cull at universities in Wales, part of over 10,000 losses UK wide. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/12/ddtr-m12.html
Sherlock, D. (2025). Welsh higher education is running out of wriggle room. Wonkhe. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/welsh-higher-education-is-running-out-of-wriggle-room/
Swansea University. (2025). Annual remuneration statement 2025. https://iss-www-00.swansea.ac.uk/media/Annual-Remuneration-Statement-2025.pdf
The Tab. (2025a, November 3). Welsh universities facing another year of financial issues amid failing funding system. The Tab. https://thetab.com/2025/11/03/welsh-universities-facing-another-year-of-financial-issues-amid-failing-funding-system
The Tab. (2026a, February 18). Cardiff University's vice-chancellor receives monthly pay rise despite £33.4 million deficit. The Tab. https://thetab.com/2026/02/18/cardiff-universitys-vice-chancellor-receives-monthly-pay-rise-despite-33-4-million-deficit
The Tab. (2026c, March 17). University of South Wales confirms 200 jobs cuts due to 'rising operating costs.' The Tab. https://thetab.com/2026/03/17/university-of-south-wales-confirms-200-jobs-cuts-due-to-rising-operating-costs
Welsh Affairs Committee. (2026). Welsh Affairs Committee statement on securing the future of Welsh universities. UK Parliament. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/162/welsh-affairs-committee/news/208002/welsh-affairs-committee-statement-on-securing-the-future-of-welsh-universities/
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