The Higher Ed Bubble is About to Pop
Reports from France indicate that 80% of all public universities run deficits now, with no way out of the economic doldrums in sight…
Several years ago, we looked at the intertwined, almost double-stranded, relationship between big institutionalised players, such as healthcare™ and education™ systems:
It would appear that the western love affair with ever more (and ever pricier) education is coming to an end, though. Those who paid attention already saw the cracks in the system, in particular if one was watching esp. US academia with its many travesties, ranging from sky-high tuition fees (that cannot be discharged via individual bankruptcy) to the questionable business plans (ahem) of many private liberal arts colleges to the inexorable rise of adjunct temporary faculty. Note that these problems predate the emergence of ‘wokery’, which in many ways did work like an accelerant anyways.
For ‘more’, please (re)visit the below-linked piece:
And here’s the stunning kicker—the systemic problems of excess growth in one sector (higher education)—aren’t confined to one country; it would be easy to mock, say, the U.S. higher education system (a public-private hybrid) while pointing to the virtually all state-run systems in Norway or France.
But the issue is, of course, a different one: as I suggested in my piece from almost four years ago, the main issue at-hand in a rapidly ageing society are working conditions (salary, working hours, etc.) vs. the issue of ‘free’ career choices. Legacy media is quite full of pieces suggesting that these are part of the problem, ranging from nursing staff quitting at the height of the pandemic™ (e.g., a nurse quitting her job™ with the gov’t and switching to a temp agency that pays much better) to young nurses never beginning to work for the state-run healthcare provider as these agencies pay so much better (with the featured 26 year-old nurse moving ‘freely’ from municipality to municipality, earning tons of money, and backpacking to Bali in-between gigs: shall we talk about falling birthrates here, too?).
None of these problems is actually new—in fact, it’s so absurdly ‘old’ that here’s a legacy media piece from 2002 that reports on precisely these work agencies offering nursing staff in case those who work for the gov’t go on strike (which happens about every 2-3 years due to the above-related bad working conditions). This situation has now become so absurd that state broadcaster NRK just came out (22 Jan. 2025) with a long-form reporting™ suggesting that young nurses, due to ‘financial constraints’ deriving low income = limited mortgage ranges, should ‘think outside the box’:
‘Unfortunately, it is probably the case that if you are single and want to enter the housing market in Oslo and some of the neighboring municipalities, the opportunities are quite poor’, says CEO Henning Lauridsen of Eiendom Norge.
Every year, Eiendom Norge produces the so-called Nurse Index [orig. sykepleierindeksen].
It shows, on average, how many of the homes available on the market a nurse can afford to buy.
In 2024, singles with a nursing salary could buy 31.6 per cent of the available homes in this country.
It is about the same as the previous year [that merely tells you that wages are either stagnating and/or prices have crept up].
With a gross annual salary of NOK 680,000, you can have a maximum mortgage of NOK 3.4 million [divide by 12 to arrive at US$ or euro ranges].
There’s also a bunch of ‘suggestions’ by experts™, which include, most notably so, to a) ‘find someone else to buy a place together with’ and b) ‘think about the size of the place and the area’. Both of these notions are probably not exactly what recent graduates in the mid-to-late 20s are looking for, but, hey, it’s da market™, eh?
All of the above, however, are merely the after-effects of a much bigger, worse problem: does it actually pay off to attend college for several years?
I tend to answer in the negative at this point, and I’m pretty sure that the brainiacs in gov’t aren’t that far behind my assessment; all of this, of course, begs the question—if college doesn’t pay, why maintain the university system in its present form?
And at this point, I’m offering you the main course of this posting—in my translation, with emphases and [snark] added.
8 Out of 10 French Universities Have Budget Deficits: ‘This is a serious warning’
The rector at the University of Lille, Régis Bordet, has pressed the big red [warning] button. The university he leads has a deficit of over half a billion [the currency would be Norwegian crowns, and given that Wikipedia gives the U of Lille’s budget as 600m €, we’re talking around 42m euros—or a budget shortfall of 7%].
By Kristin Jonassen Nordby, Khrono, 1 Feb 2026 [source; archived]
Many French universities are struggling with red accounting figures. Already last year, 60 out of a total of 75 universities reported that the budget is in the red and since then the situation has only gotten worse.
‘Never before have we faced such a large deficit. This applies not only to us, but to most universities. This is a serious warning’, says the rector of the University of Lille, Régis Bordet, when Khrono meets him in his office.
Despite major cuts in university spending in recent years, the deficit has only continued to grow [something’s (not) working, eh?]. Rector Bordet points to, among other things, more students, inflation, increased energy prices, higher salary obligations and state-imposed expenses, which are not compensated. The university has 80,000 students and almost 8,000 employees, adding:
Eventually, we will no longer have money to pay salaries, repair and maintain our buildings, for research and teaching quality. We are depleting our reserves. Next year, we will not have any more saved funds left to use.
The economic situation means that the employees are constantly tasked with more tasks to keep the wheels turning, says trade union representative and lecturer in mathematics Claire Bornais at the University of Lille.
‘It just gets worse and worse’, she says when Khrono meets her.
‘Carved to the Bone’
The budget crisis among French universities means that France Universités (equivalent to the Council of Universities and Colleges) and an increasing number of university rectors are shouting warnings about the situation.
‘I want to press the alarm button as a final warning. We must be quick to mobilise to save the universities’, warns the president of France Universités Lamri Adoui.
‘Already two years ago I announced that we have cut to the bone. This is a warning cry’, says Chancellor Christine Neau-Leduc at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne to the newspaper Le Parisien about the situation. Now this university has seen itself obliged to increase the tuition fees for foreign students.
The University of Bordeaux ended the year with an eight million euros shortfall (92 million crowns) out of a budget of a total of 600 million euros, according to the newspaper France Bleu [that’s 1.3% shortfall]. Rector Dean Lewis warns of job cuts if the situation continues like this. Already, 200 positions are not filled to save money, says the rector of France Bleu [this is so totally BS, it’s hard not to notice this: the median income in France (2024) was around 40K (times 200 = 8m), but that would be w/o operating expenses, utility bills, etc.]
‘The universities are like the passengers on the Titanic’, Lewis said to Le Parisien [that’s actually an apt metaphor, with rectors and vice-chancellors currently cosplaying a game of musical chairs—for it ain’t their comfy salaries that are at stake].
The rector at the University of Angers is equally distraught:
‘Despite a colossal effort over the past year, we are at the limit of what can be accepted’, says rector Françoise Grolleau, according to Le Parisien
The Perfect Storm
The rector of the University of Lille, Régis Bordet, says there are several reasons why the university has ended up in the financial predicament they now find themselves in.
In 2018, three universities merged to form what is now the University of Lille, he explains:
The merger has cost. The three universities had very different starting points when it came to both building stock and finances. One of the universities already had large operating losses and there are large differences in the maintenance of the buildings. This gave us a more vulnerable foundation.
Recently, they had to close 16 lecture halls that could no longer be used: ‘We now have to refurbish these, without getting any additional funds to do so.’1
The board adds that the merger has also come at a cost in terms of the need for new employees and leadership. Régis Bordet adds:
In addition, we have had a large growth in the number of students, without a corresponding growth in grants. This at a time when both inflation and electricity prices have increased. This has been the recipe for an economically unsustainable situation.
Gov’t Grants Below the Average per Student
In France, universities no longer receive a fixed grant per student and Lille is one of the universities that receives below the national average [this is the money paragraph, as anyone who’s on a fixed income (retirees) understands immediately], the rector explains:
There are huge differences between the support for the various universities. We come out badly, but there are other universities that get even less.
We are also getting less and less state support to provide accommodation for students who need it [who determines that? Plus—should that be the job of the university to begin with?]. Grants no longer cover the expenses.
The poor economy makes it more difficult to tackle challenges. Bordet:
We only have 47 per cent of our first-year students who take their exams in the first semester. In addition, we want to prioritise the psychosocial provision and we have major refurbishment needs [I understand the renovations, but if less than half of all students take their exams, perhaps they shouldn’t be there in the first place? I’m all for giving people a chance—but most are studying without being forced to do so (/sarcasm); perhaps teaching contract law in high school (enrolment being a contract) might help?].
France’s national budget deficit and political crisis with frequent changes of ministers and prime ministers have not helped matters [nope, but I fail to see how less than half of all freshmen not showing up for exams is affected by that shitshow]. Bordet continues:
We received signals that we would get more funds [talk about throwing good money after bad…], but before it could come into effect, a new minister was in place. Right now I don’t see where this will end.
The forecasts indicate that the growth in the number of students will continue until 2030:
‘We are the size of a medium-sized city with our 80,000 students. Maybe the budgets will be in balance when the number of students starts to decrease’, he says [a rare lucid moment; please allow me to inform you where this will end: either the university will have fewer students or more gov’t funding—these things will even out over time, but here’s another policy choice: try getting ahead of the curve by ramping up standards? It’s a waste of time advocating for that (I’ve been doing this at my workplace for years, but to no avail for the force of Marxisante pseudo-egalitarianism is too strong)].
Internal Solidarity
According to Bordet, the university has already made savings equivalent to 30 million euros (345 million kroner) since 2022 [more gaslighting: the U of Liller has a budget of 600m euros, which means that this is a 5% cut over 3 years]. They have coordinated some studies, ended some courses, opened some new ones. In addition, they have removed 100 administrative positions [I’m all for doing that, but here’s the rub: 100 times the median salary (40K) is 4m; what’s up with the other 26m you saved™?]:
We have turned over every penny at every single faculty [as I said, a 26m cut over three years is brutal, but what did you get out of this?]. We have also seen that there are differences between the disciplines when it comes to costs and salaries [no shit analysis, Sherlock; I wonder what you highly-educated brainiacs discover™ next]. We have worked on redistributing resources.
[Khrono] How is this received by the employees?
[Régis Bordet] It is not received particularly positively. It is a big job to create understanding for the internal solidarity by showing the great inequalities and that we must do more to equalise them [that Marxisante pseudo-egalitarianism, it’s still going strong; I suppose the advanced particle physics department should have as much money as, say, the School of Education, right? Right (morons)].
Every week, rector Régis Bordet meets with the heads of the various faculties [that seems a waste of time]:
When we have to fight for better budgets, it is important that we do not also fight internally [talk about the (neoliberal-managerial) revolution eating its children].
[Khrono] Which subjects have been and are in danger of being closed down?
[Bordet] There have been some language subjects that have been discontinued, but we want to keep as many as possible of the 22 languages we teach today. Unfortunately, we do not offer Norwegian, but we do have Swedish lessons.
High Degree of Temporary Faculty and More Stress
Trade union representative and lecturer in mathematics at the University of Lille, Claire Bornais, takes a dark view of the situation:
The employees are affected by the economic situation. Working conditions are deteriorating. Student services are getting worse.
Bornais tells of positions that are not filled and the high use of temporary instructors:
This means that more and more work falls on the permanent employees. This also applies when temporary workers are to be recruited, because they are the ones who have the necessary contacts. It is also expected that they raise more funds externally to finance their research with all the bureaucracy that entails. Everything is done in addition to the ordinary work [can we just go back to how things were, say, 25 years ago?].
In order to save money, they are asked to reduce the number of teaching hours for the students, but it is still expected that the students will perform just as well [fun fact: some do, perhaps about the same share as before; as always, the devil is in the details—and the so-called Bologna Process is, in my view, among the core reasons for this: why are we talking so much about this and not, e.g., that students appear to be increasingly unwilling and/or unable to put in the work hours needed? See the footnote for particulars2].
‘Several people have lost faith in the meaning of work. They experience a downgrading of their professional status. The situation also leads to more conflicts between teachers and subject areas’, says Bornais.
Many employees complain of stress.
‘Scientists no longer have time to think the long thoughts needed to make discoveries’, she says.
Temporary workers, on the other hand, are paid very poorly as there is high competition for the jobs that are on the market.
Politics Wanted
[Khrono] Is there anything the management could have done differently or is this about politics?
[Bornais] If it was only about management, then it would mean that 80 per cent of French universities have bad managers. The crisis is due to misguided policies from our current government [it’s likely that both aspects are true].
Bornais reacts strongly to how the minister of higher education downplays the problem by brushing it off with the comment ‘It’s not exactly Zola’, a French expression showing that the situation is not dramatic or dire.
The minister further says that he will use the start of the year to get a common overview of the resources in academia and open a dialogue about the governance limitations at the higher education institutions, according to Le Monde.
‘It’s so condescending. As of today, the government is not open about how they distribute funds between the universities. Every year, the University of Lille receives more students without receiving more funding. We are going backwards into the future’, says Bornais.
She believes that the only thing that can make the government turn around is if the employees stop working or at least refuse to do all the extra tasks they are now taking on to keep the wheels turning [ah, a good ol’ strike of workers in France: my guess is that if this happens, it’ll have the about same effect as the Icelandic women’s strike—a bit of agit-prop, but no measurable outcomes]:
Then everything would stop immediately, but the lecturers do not have a conscience about it because it will ultimately affect their students. They sacrifice themselves for the university and for the students, but soon it won’t work anymore.
Cuts to Language Instruction
Rector Régis Bordet describes the discussions with the political leadership as tough:
The first thing we have to agree on is how much the government actually gives to the universities. They claim it is six billion euros, but where are these funds? The figures also vary from one report to another.
The rector points to the current geopolitical situation and makes it extra important that the universities are robust:
The universities are the foundation for democracy and our sovereignty. We need to educate our young people in French and European values at a time when we see that our historical allies can become our enemies.
Bottom Lines
What is the task of the academy in the first place? Train the select few to perform important tasks in the future—or serve as ‘the foundation for democracy and our sovereignty’?
It ain’t the latter.
Regular readers know that I sometimes write about academia, mainly by way of navel-gazing but also to highlight trends that will filter through to the mainstream in a few years, such as the Woke™ and Tran$ BS, which took off in US academia about a decade ago—and look at us now.
Then there’s the entire absurdity revolving around the role and functioning of universities: they are about training students, not to curry favour with each and every of their whims.
The discussed piece is, above all, a harbinger of things to come, though: higher education for the masses has become the means and ends to itself—we need more funding for things to stay the same is the classic marker of a Ponzi scheme (same as mass immigration, by the way).
It’s also—much like the top-cited example of nursing—an indicator, or early warning sign, of the end of the neoliberal-managerial era: we’ve increased the amount of staffers™, experts™, administrators™, and the like beyond that which is necessary or helpful.
If the universities are in trouble—and, over time, producing less graduates—this will trickle down into the labour market.
My personal experience in academia suggests that institutions are increasingly trying to placate every new demand, whim, and BS peddled by students, journos™, or politicos™. And they are doing so because they have over-invested in infrastructure (partly due to Covid-induced ‘special funding’ and partly because New Public Management points to what’s called ‘third-party funding’, i.e., investments, donations, etc. from non-state actors) and are now faced with the double-whammy of dwindling enrolment numbers and increasingly bureaucratised structures (courtesy of New Public Management).
As a meta consequence, academia is today run by a dual hierarchy of idiots whose primary markers are incompetence and decision-making by people who don’t know shit from shinola:
historically, universities are self-governing, quasi-autonomous entities run by academics (who don’t know how to do govern/manage institutions with some 30,000 people)
that is why a permanent bureaucracy (administrators) has been installed, ostensibly to help the professors but, in reality, they call all the shots without knowing a single thing about academia
Hence, it’s not a dialogue between deaf and blind people (although that metaphor—by French historian Fernand Braudel considering interdisciplinary exchange of historians and sociologists—has more than a kernel of truth), but it’s way, way, way worse.
Read up on these intimations here:
We’re witnessing the end of higher ed as it existed since 1945; the road will be bumpy, but there’s no more off-ramps.
Given that the state will need certain numbers of graduates in this or that field (think: nuclear engineers), and given that most students don’t want to learn/work hard (cue the 47% of freshmen who actually take exams), we’ll likely see more coercive measures before too long.
When the Roman Empire devolved 1800 or so years ago, this is what happened (this is from the ‘The Sun is Setting’ piece linked at the top):
Running into a set of actually quite comparable troubles, the Roman Empire in the 3rd Century AD first decreed maximum prices for what we may arguably call ‘goods and services’ before moving on to rendering professions hereditary.
We’re already experiencing variations of these measures, as exemplified by collective bargaining procedures as well as certain limitations on job choice, such as residency contracts and the like. Apart from these ‘extra-economic’ constraints, economically and socially, essentially comparable pressures and limitations—academic potential is highly correlated with parental achievement—are currently serving as ‘(in)visible’ guardrails.
I suspect that more and more of these measures will be implemented over the next couple of years, putting more pressure, from ever more angles, on the possibilities and freedoms of any given individual.
Add to that the rampant militarisation due to Covid the Climate Catastrophe Russia! Russia! Russia!, I submit it’s quite easy to see where we’re headed.
Perhaps we should talk next about the question, ‘can a nation go to war with empty coffers’? (If history is any guide, that’s a clear yes.)
This is from an infobox:
The University of Lille
The predecessor of the university was established in 1559. In 1896, the university became a reality.
Today, the university has 78,000 students and almost 8,000 employees
Almost 10,000 international students
Régis Bordet has been rector since 2022. He is now in his second four-year term as principal [end of the infobox]
Here’s the Wikipedia article, with Grokipedia adding this veritable gem:
Bureaucratic overload has compounded these issues, as the Process's emphasis on standardization and accountability imposes substantial administrative demands on institutions. Complex quality assurance arrangements, including mandatory external evaluations and reporting, are criticized for increasing workload without proportional gains in effectiveness, with uneven tool usage adding to procedural inefficiencies.[117] Internationalization and mobility initiatives further strain resources, requiring additional documentation for credit transfers, visa compliance, and grant portability, which only 16 systems fully enable.[118][115]
And then there’s the old way of obtaining course credits: in the olden days of pre-Bologna Process higher ed, one would attend a course and, upon successful participation, receive credits to the tune of two (or four) semester-hours, calculated as 1 typical semester being 14 weeks and one two-hour-per-week course giving one 28 hours of in-classroom instruction; whatever other stuff was required (reading assignments, essay writing, exam prep, etc.) would not be counted.
Now, however, the same two-hours-per-week lectures will get a student anywhere from 3 so-called ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) in Germany or Switzerland to up to 10 or 15 ECTS in Norway (but, hey, it’s all the same, eh?).
Plus there’s the entire maths issue of 1 ECTS being equal to 25-30 hours of work per semester. Now, if you get 3 ECTS for a lecture of 2 hours/week, 1 such ECTS credit point would be attendance in class with the other two points for everything else (reading assignments, coursework, exam prep, etc.). I do fail to see why that all needs to be accounted for, esp. if—like in Norway—you’d get up to 15 ECTS for the same lecture.
But. These silly ECTS points let us grasp one thing that was previously quite impossible to fathom: the amount of work per course a full-time student is supposed to put in.
A good rule for determining if a post or employment is needed and necessary is to observe what happens when the person stays home.
Does their absence affect work in any meaningful way?
If no, then they and their job isn't needed.
Was it the Netherlands that went without government for over a year, and pretty much everything improved during that "interregnum"?