An industry-style focus on teaching costs is vital to survive the pandemic

This is an approach that focuses on cost and not value. You can’t apply ‘industrial’ models to academia for a very simple reason: a university is not a factory churning out identical widgets but a place of learning where outcomes aren’t predictable and shouldn’t be. Presumably this genius model should also apply to composers? If a symphony doesn’t use the clarinets very much then it’s not cost effective to play it. Or books? If an author doesn’t use every letter of the alphabet equally, it’s not economical to print it. What a waste the letter X is. The fundamental error here is the belief that fees pay for contact time - they don’t. They pay for membership of the university. And membership means you’re paying for everything, not just the bits you use, because you’re part of the community and you get out what you put in, not what you pay for in some bizarre spreadsheet calculation. There are other forms of capital than just money, after all. Some knowledge is worth preserving, developing, and passing on regardless of how many people are ‘interested’ and the value might only be realised many years, possibly decades, later. If you start treating knowledge like it’s a fast moving consumer good with an instant return we’ll soon be teaching nothing but how to look like a Love Island contestant or best ways to make viral Tik Tok videos. Actually, there’s a thought...

"Let’s assume that the central administration consumes 60 per cent of the £10,000 fee" ... and then let's fight over the rest. The elephant in the room here is central admin. If they consumed less, we could afford more. Maybe if there were fewer of David Graeber's bullshit jobs in the centre, we wouldn't be in this position?

Well thank god you have retired from the system. The key question you do not even address is the complete waste of money on bureaucracy in the Universities. It is overpaid managers with little value added that are consuming far too much of fees that students pay. I calculated on one of my modules with 260 students paying £9250 and the module was 1/8th of the full time lecture load that means my module generated £300,655 for the University divided by 20 hours of teaching equals £15,031.25 per hour taught or £30,063 for the two hours I taught. That is excluding the foreign students paying an even higher rate. I teach other several other modules on top of this. So where is all that money going ???? certainly not into my pay packet ! So please address the more interesting question of why Universities have so many bureaucrats why the academics that generate the teaching and research get so little then you might have something useful to do in your retirement !

A university are not a factory and knowledge is not a commodity. Too many top managers at universities behave like they are the next Elon Musk of higher education.

I'm amazed that the top slicing of University revenue for the maintenance of central administration has been so casually dismissed. Having cost centres which are not only expensive but which have little relative value is an unacceptable burden to a University. Of course it's the elephant in the room. Let's be clear. The primacy of any University's activity is the delivery of properly constructed education by those who deliver it ... Lecturers. Any other activity which does not directly support this primacy is, quite frankly, secondary. Course design was once a thing of beauty, constructed by those in full charge of their discipline(s). There were natural reins introduced by the sensible consideration of resources by course teams. Non academics did not have a seat at the table. Now it's difficult for academics to find a seat at the table. These are difficult times and managers are getting found out. Covid-19 is presenting the sector with an opportunity to purge the toxins that have accumulated in the University body. Not necessarily because there is a desire to do so but certainly because it needs to be done.