When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it looked at first as if many European universities were going to escape the worst. Higher education has long been considered a public right and a taxpayer-financed obligation, and there was optimism that universities, which government leaders hail as drivers of economic growth, would emerge relatively unscathed.
Four years in, that is no longer the case. With governments facing unyielding international pressure to reduce deficits by curbing public spending, universities in Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal are suffering from their most painful cuts in decades. European universities, which on average rely on public money for nearly 75 percent of their finances, are wrestling with hiring freezes, rising tuition, and declines in campus services.
Greece, which has been subjected to stringent fiscal requirements by international lenders to qualify for bailout money, has become emblematic of the worst of the crisis. And universities, along with the entire public sector, are on the receiving end of biting national austerity measures. New faculty appointments have been almost completely halted, and there are growing worries of a brain drain. “We are losing younger colleagues and the more qualified of the older generation,” says Panos Tsakloglou, an associate professor of economics at the Athens University of Economics and Business, who has seen his effective income decline by around a third in the past couple of years. Academics with established reputations who can command higher salaries abroad are increasingly succumbing to the temptation, while others are leaving academe altogether and turning to potentially more lucrative fields, he says. The prevailing mood at universities and throughout the country, he says, is one of “demoralization.”
A similar sentiment has gripped Spain, where youth unemployment levels are above 50 percent and some 300,000 recent university graduates emigrated last year in what the labor minister called a “dramatic exodus” without parallel in the country’s modern history. The new conservative government elected in December is pushing through budget cuts resulting in reductions of between 5 and 15 percent in universities’ allocations and has issued an executive order freezing public-sector hiring for 2012. Responsibility for higher education falls largely to the 17 autonomous regions, akin to states, but the national directive has meant that tenure-track faculty at universities across the country are mired in administrative limbo, with institutions unable to commit to hiring decisions.
John Stone, a native Canadian who received his doctorate from the University of Barcelona, where he teaches English literature, has fulfilled the requirements for tenure but, because of the hiring moratorium, has “jumped through all the prescribed hoops only to find that there’s nowhere to land after the last jump,” he says. Academic salaries at the university have been cut twice in the past two years, even as class sizes and workloads have increased.
Mr. Stone teaches two courses of two sections each, lecturing for six hours a week, and the nearly 90 students in each class are roughly twice the number he had just four or five years ago, he says. Adjunct staff—whose monthly take-home salary is often less than $1,000 for a courseload equivalent to three-fourths of a professor’s—are being let go. Retiring professors are not being replaced, and “we correct all our papers ourselves,” he says, adding that “there’s now talk of increasing courseloads by up to 50 percent, depending on your output as a researcher.” Faculty deemed to generate too little research, on proposed measures that Mr. Stone says seem based on publication output rather than quality, could find themselves with doubled workloads.
Shuttered Libraries
Institutions are trimming costs wherever they can. The University of Barcelona has eliminated budget allocations for the preservation of old books and manuscripts, although Adelaida Ferrer, the university’s head librarian, says she is able to authorize spending on a selective basis. Summer temperatures in Barcelona can reach the 90’s and, without proper care for the materials, the sweltering humidity can be especially damaging. In a cost-cutting measure, most of the university’s 16 libraries were closed over the Easter break, leaving only two open at a time, and subscriptions to some 500 of the library’s 15,000 publications have been canceled.
Andreu Mas-Collel is finance minister of Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital. A former regional minister for higher education and research, he is a renowned economist who has taught at Berkeley and Harvard. He calls the arguments by some in the university sector that the country should be investing more in higher education to stimulate economic growth “wishful thinking.” Universities should instead be seeking increased private contributions and exploring other means of generating revenue, he says. “I tell my colleagues, ‘If the only option is to rely on the public budget, you are condemning yourselves.’”
Last year undergraduate tuition across Spain rose to around 1,000 euros, an increase of around 15 percent. Last month the national education minister met with regional officials to discuss a possible increase of an additional 50 to 65 percent by September. Tuition now generates 15 percent of universities’ budgets, and the extra income from the increase helped offset cuts by regional governments. Mr. Mas-Collel does not envision anything as drastic in Spain as the tripling of tuition that will take place in England this autumn, but says that if quality standards are to be maintained, “fees will have to go up even more.”
Universities elsewhere in Europe are looking to students to bear a greater share of the cost of their educations as well. “The question of tuition fees is being discussed in almost all countries in Europe,” says Thomas Estermann, who leads the unit for governance, autonomy, and finance at the Brussels-based European University Association, which has been monitoring the impact of the economic crisis since 2009.
The latest data gathered by Mr. Estermann’s unit, to be published next month, show declines in public financing even in some systems where politicians had pledged to keep levels constant. Hungary has cut public financing for universities by 18 percent since 2011, for example, and Portugal, once lauded for its commitment to maintain higher-education spending, has joined the growing group of countries that have cut such spending by at least 10 percent.
The impact of the cuts has varied from system to system and among institutions, says Mr. Estermann, but there are common themes. “It has hit universities where it’s most painful, in human resources,” he says. The hiring freezes that have been imposed on many systems, for example, could have long-term consequences. “It brings a strategic advantage when you can hire, and universities in those countries that have to deal with freezes lose a lot of time,” even when the constraints are ostensibly for a limited period, he says.
Burdensome Regulations
António Rendas, rector of the New University of Lisbon and president of the Council of Rectors of the Portuguese Universities, says institutions there are regressing in other ways as well. “We are now coming back to very tight regulation” after a period of increasing independence for universities, says Mr. Rendas. Universities cannot commit to long-term agreements for hiring faculty and staff, to research agreements with universities in other countries, or even to paying for operating expenses like technical support, without seeking government dispensation. “It’s not just the effect of the cuts, it is the increasing weight of the regulation procedures that are imposed on the whole Portuguese system,” says Mr. Rendas. He estimates that he spends twice as much time dealing with bureaucratic issues than he did before the crisis.
António Costa Pinto, a political scientist and a research professor at Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences, says that throughout Portugal, professors have endured salary cuts amounting to 30 percent of their net income over the past two years. The country is quickly losing the ability to attract the best faculty and retain the best graduates, and he fears that it is falling into what he calls “a sort of third-world pattern.”
Faculty are resorting to tactics that academics in Latin America employed some 20 years ago in order to survive, when “the average university professor had two positions, one in the state system and one in the private sector,” he says. The slashing of public support also means that Portugal is losing hard-won gains in research performance and scientific output. Two years ago the government awarded financing to 1,000 postdoctoral science fellows. This year it has money for just 80.
All postdoctoral and doctoral grants that were supposed to be paid out at the start of the year have yet to be paid, although the posts have been occupied. Grants to support financially needy undergraduates were cut by about 50 percent this year, leaving thousands of students across the country in the lurch.
Academics at Irish universities have also had their salaries cut and teaching burdens increased, while retiring staff are not being replaced and fixed-term contracts are not being renewed. Still, says Brian Norton, president of the Dublin Institute of Technology, “the impact on front-level teaching is less than one would imagine, and higher productivity is emerging out of the system.”
He notes that higher education there has not been battered as much as some other fields. Ireland’s construction industry, for example, has collapsed. A national agreement between the government and public-sector unions has shielded universities from layoffs and having to impose additional salary cuts.
Michael J. Delargey, a lecturer in education at University College Cork, is grateful for what he calls the “safety valve” of the agreement, but says it has also imposed stringent new requirements, including productivity targets. Student numbers are up and class sizes are bigger, he says, although in some cases the numbers are welcome. He teaches a graduate course on mathematics education. There were six students in the module this year, and if the number had fallen below that, he would have had to cancel it.
For some researchers, the combination of cuts and restructuring offers a prime opportunity to study the lasting effects of the global crisis on higher education. “The big question is, ‘Are we seeing a paradigm shift or is this just a downward turn in the business cycle?’” says Ellen Hazelkorn, vice president for research and enterprise at the Dublin Institute of Technology, who is embarking on such a study. Equally important, she says: “How do we know quality is being affected?”
As salary freezes continue and class sizes go up, many academics would say the answer is obvious. Universities cannot afford to be complacent about the effects of the cuts, says Mr. Estermann. While the money taken from universities does little to reduce national deficits, the sums in question do “a lot of damage” when removed from institutional budgets, he says.
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