After years of obfuscation, Oxford University colleges have revealed the scale of their vast wealth for the first time* by publishing audited accounts. The 36 independent colleges have built combined capital assets of more than £1.6bn in land, property, shares and cash deposits.
The wealthiest, Tony Blair's old college, St John's, sits on a £202m fortune, according to accounts for 2002-03. This includes a property portfolio of £55m made up of huge swaths of the city of Oxford - houses, pubs and commercial buildings.
But the accounts reveal merely a part of the colleges' huge wealth. They do not include the value of historic college buildings and grounds, which could amount to tens of millions if they were ever sold to commercial buyers. While welcoming the university's new transparency, the student union said that, in the context of such great wealth, it believed the colleges could survive without controversial top-up fees of up to £3,000, due to be introduced in 2006.
The figures are not being published on the internet and have initially been produced only in a "vast book" form for the perusal of college bursars. "We hope to have another print run ready by next week and will provide further copies then," said a spokesman for the university. Oxford has, however, gone one better than its rival in wealth and reputation. Cambridge University has yet to bow to pressure from the government and public to publish similar accounts. "We hope to do it in this form in 2005," said a spokesman.
With the government urging all universities to generate more income of their own, college bursars said their establishments were showing a healthy return on investments of 8.9%. About 4% of this was spent and 4.9% added to capital to combat inflation. Frank Marshall, bursar of University College, said about half of the college's capital assets of £63m was made up of property, including farms, two hotels and shops. Despite the appearance of great wealth, he said it was important that more donations were encouraged from alumni. "These accounts show a jolly good return on our endowments, partly because of the property we have, which performs very well," he said. "But that is in one year. We need to make sure we communicate well with our alumni, and hopefully this transparency will encourage that. We need to attract the kind of support that has, over the years, made it possible to have colleges like this."
Despite their independent wealth, 15 of the colleges are running deficits which college bursars say are due to a gap in government funding for undergraduate teaching and the real cost of a college-based degree programme. In this context, Oxford and other universities are likely to charge the maximum top-up fees of £3,000 to students. "I don't think you will find any university who is not considering the top level of fees when they come in," said one academic source. The accounts reveal the huge gap between older, wealthier colleges such as Christ Church, with capital assets of £173m, and struggling newcomers such as Harris Manchester, with a mere £1m and a deficit of £24,000 last year.
John Blake, president of the Oxford University Student Union, said the discrepancy had to be addressed in a more organised way. "Although this picture isn't complete, it proves what we have been saying, that these inequalities are enormous and the university must deal with them." The scale of wealth within Oxford University puts the efficiencies of other universities into stark relief. In the absence of hundreds of millions of pounds of assets, Warwick University, at only 40 years old, has become the fifth most successful in the country. It has one endowment, which provided an income of £1.64m in 2002-03, and had a surplus of £4.72m in the same year.
Yesterday, other universities questioned again why the government continues to provide extra money to Oxford and Cambridge in the form of college fees, which Mr Blair has pledged to maintain until 2008. One source said: "We all have to fight for money and you have to think what is rational about giving this extra money to Oxford and Cambridge and not to others. How can you actually say it is an equitable and fair thing to do?"
| College | Assets | College | Assets | |
| St John's | £202m | Oriel | £29m | |
| Christ Church | £173m | St Hilda's | £26m | |
| All Souls | £129m | Somerville | £26m | |
| Magdalen | £102m | Wadham | £26m | |
| Nuffield | £101m | Pembroke | £20m | |
| Merton | £92m | St Antony's | £19m | |
| Queen's | £82m | St Anne's | £18m | |
| Jesus | £72m | Wolfson | £18m | |
| University | £63m | Lady Margaret Hall | £17m | |
| New College | £58m | St Edmund Hall | £17m | |
| Brasenose | £57m | Keble | £16m | |
| Trinity | £45m | St Peter's | £16m | |
| Balliol | £40m | Worcester | £16m | |
| Corpus Christi | £37m | St Hugh's | £14m | |
| Lincoln | £35m | Mansfield | £5m | |
| St Catherine's | £33m | Linacre | £4m | |
| Exeter | £29m | Harris Manchester | £1m | |
| Hertford | £29m | Templeton | £1m |
* This is simply untrue. As Akme followers will already know, the Oxford college accounts were in fact first published in 1997, when the 1993 Charities Act finally became law, obliging the colleges to make them available (see Sunday Times, November 1997 and Akme index and explanation). The 2000/01 and 2001/02 figures (and for the five richest Cambridge colleges) were posted on this website in March 2004 (see Sunday Times report). It seems that what they are relying on here is that for the first time the accounts are in the Government-required 'SORP' format, bringing them more into line with conventional commercial practice. The colleges now provide written reports and valuations of their capital assets, although of course without lists identifying them (the estates and farms up and down the country, the docklands, the commercial and residential properties, the stockmarket portfolios etc.), these cannot be checked. Amazingly, Akme's guesstimates of the colleges' 2002 capital assets, which were casually inferred from their declared income streams and then quoted by the Sunday Times, have turned out to be roughly correct, as have Akme's league table rankings of the colleges' relative wealth and performance. The whole PR fanfare may even look like a direct response to Akme's Spring posting, but the timing is presumably coincidental. Still it is nice, for once, to feel oneself the triggering puppeteer rather than the peppered puppet. Hard-pressed scholars are advised to keep revisiting this site for further revelations.
CLICK FOR OTHER CONTEMPORARY REPORTS ON THE OXFORD COLLEGE ACCOUNTS:
The Financial Times, 7/7/04 (+ table), The Times, 8/7/04 (+ barmy table), The Guardian, 7/7/04 (+ table), The Daily Telegraph, 8/7/04, The Oxford Times, 9/7/04 (+ list). See also Sunday Times, 16/11/97, Sunday Times, 28/3/04, THES, 16/7/04 and THES, 1/10/04.
CLICK FOR AKME INVESTIGATION: THE COLLEGES' INVESTMENT PERFORMANCE, 1973-2003
Press release and Index, and Oxford Student, 26/5/05 on the failure of the college contribution scheme.