Sunday Times of UK: Nigeria’s Economic Crisis Reverberates in Dundee Varsity, Other UK Institutions

* Redundancies, resignations rise as institutions face bankruptcy 

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

UK universities now face significant threats to their finances, a fallout of the economic crisis in Nigeria, especially, the depreciation in the country’s currency, which has reduced enrolments from the West African country.
The once booming institutions are struggling to close substantial financial holes, following the increasing inability of potential students from Nigeria to pay for admission and existing students to raise the required funding.
Several resignations have taken place in the universities and many redundancies have been declared in the institutions, including Dundee, Edinburgh, Robert Gordon, among others.
An apparently unforeseen £30 million black hole had appeared in the accounts of Dundee university, with external auditors recruited to try to pinpoint what went so spectacularly wrong at an institution crucial to the city’s economy and reputation that 600 redundancies had to be announced.
Part of the answer, a report by The Times of UK said, laid 4,000 miles away in Nigeria, where the university had chalked up great success in attracting overseas students to fill its coffers.
When the Nigerian currency, the naira, was sharply devalued in June 2023, the finances for thousands of students were undermined to the extent that shock waves washed up on the banks of the Tay, the report said.
The Interim Principal, Dundee, Professor Shane O’Neill, admitted this month that the scale of the deficit had been “lurking for quite a long time and has only just been fully understood”.
As vice principal since 2021, O’Neill claimed he was blindsided by the deficit and “the quality of financial information” provided by finance officers was insufficient to allow senior managers to grasp the extent of the problem.
He pointed to the “severe drop” in international student recruitment and the structural underfunding of higher education, allied with cost increases, inflationary pressure and other detrimental changes, such as the UK government-imposed increase in employers’ national insurance contributions.
The university had also “performed poorly” on its recruitment of Scottish students, starving it of state-paid tuition fees and rental income for in-house accommodation.
Dundee is not alone in feeling the squeeze. Seven of Scotland’s 18 universities recorded a deficit in their most recent accounts, according to research by the Scottish Liberal Democrats. Staff at Edinburgh University have already been warned that “nothing is off the table” as the institution seeks to make urgent savings to fill its own £140 million financial black hole, the report stated.
At Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Professor Steve Oliver, the principal, warned of a “major existential threat” to the higher education sector, adding that universities are “significantly underfunded”.
But Dundee, which stated in its 2022-23 accounts that “increasing tuition fee income … remains one of the essential foundations of the university’s future financial sustainability”, has been hit particularly hard by the drop in overseas students.
At the time it was regularly featuring highly in rankings for student satisfaction and research excellence, particularly in life sciences, in which it was a global leader. It supported about one in 12 jobs in the city — about 6,700 positions — and had nearly 13,000 students.
It was generating nearly half a billion pounds annually for the city economy and three times as much for the UK economy, with about a third of its income from tuition fees.
This reputation is now under threat after £30 million of reserves “disappeared like snow off a dyke in a culture of conspicuous spending”, in the words of Michael Marra, a former university official who now sits in the Scottish parliament.
Lorraine Kelly, the popular TV presenter who once served as university rector, said the loss of more than 600 jobs would be “absolutely devastating”.
She told the BBC, “We are talking today about finding out why this happened but, to be honest, the horse has bolted. If these measures are going to be taken I really do fear for the future.”
The first sign of the economic shock wave about to hit the sector appeared in February last year when Enroly, the online platform used to recruit foreign students, reported a 37 per cent drop in applications compared with the previous year. 
Universities cited new government visa rules, brought in by the Conservative government to curb legal migration from countries, such as India, and the Nigerian currency crisis, for the drop.
Acceptance data suggested numbers from Nigeria, which was providing more students than the EU countries combined at 33,000, had fallen 71 per cent. Two English universities had to ask Nigerian students to quit their courses because of unpaid fees. Robert Gordon, also particularly affected by currency fluctuations in Nigeria, said student numbers had fallen “off a cliff”.
All this came against a background of allegations of extravagant spending by senior staff at Dundee over a period of years.
Professor Iain Gillespie, appointed as Dundee principal in 2020, was feted as the broom to sweep away the scandal of Andrew Atherton, the previous principal who had resigned 10 months earlier amid allegations of bullying and a bizarre row over unpaid rent at his luxury university accommodation. His resignation sparked fury when it emerged that he had received six months’ pay in lieu of notice.
Then the rug was pulled. Nigeria was the university’s biggest source of international students, nearly 1,300 in 2022-23, outstripping all of the countries of Europe, the Middle East and North America combined. Indian student numbers also started dropping.
Gillespie told Holyrood’s education committee in June that the Nigerian devaluation, coupled with the visa changes, had severely dented tuition fee income.
He said, “Fundamentally, the model for supporting students from Africa was that their families would come together and provide support — in other words, their fees — for them, and the students would bring their families with them.
“The family members would often work in the care sector and support not just the provision of care in Scotland, but their spouse through university. The removal of the dependant visa is associated with a significant decline in the number of students from Nigeria, in particular, but also from elsewhere.”
At least five senior officials who were in post over the past few tumultuous years at the university have resigned, including Gillespie in December, and there have also been changes in the university’s governing court.

Graeme Dey, the higher education minister, said it was “unwise” for some universities to become over-reliant on tuition fees from Nigeria.

John Swinney, the first minister, said on Wednesday, “Something acutely destabilising has happened at the University of Dundee and we’ll have to understand what that’s all about.”