Fifteen of Oxford's 36 colleges are running deficits but together they have built up assets of £2bn - far greater than any other British university except Cambridge, according to new figures published today. Between them, the colleges own land and property worth £600m and last year had cash in the bank totalling £53m.
The audited college accounts, published today, are seen in standard form for the first time this year* in a bid to increase transparency and try to prove to politicians and the public that the colleges are well run. The 2002-03 accounts show a return on investment of 8.9%, which bursars argue is a good performance compared with an average of 3.4% for UK shares. This is comparable to the returns on endowments of the top American private universities - although Oxford's wealth looks meagre alongside Harvard's $18.8bn or the endowments of Stanford ($8.6bn), Yale ($11bn) or Princeton ($8.7bn).
The accounts reveal the huge gap between the older, wealthier colleges like Christ Church - which has an annual income of £173m - and struggling newcomers like Harris Manchester, which listed an income of £1m and a deficit of £24,000 last year. Tony Blair's old college, St John's, tops the list with an income of £202m.
In general, the former women's colleges have poorer financial performance figures, largely because they have not had centuries to build up endowments and former students have not had large sums of money to dispose of. St Hilda's is the exception, and remains a women's only college, with an income of £26m. Of the new colleges, only Nuffield has broken into the top five with an income of £101m a year (perhaps because it is full of economists).
Since Victorian times, Oxford's colleges have operated a complicated "tax" system known as the College contributions scheme, in which the richest colleges pay towards increasing the endowments of the poorest ones. In one way, the accounts greatly underestimate the colleges' wealth, because most of their historic buildings are valued at nothing - they are deemed to have depreciated over the years to zero. In practice, a college is unlikely to sell out to a developer and realise millions of pounds, while the cost of maintaining listed buildings is a big drain on their resources.
While Oxford colleges are the envy of most UK universities because of the funds at their disposal, they do subsidise student teaching by between £1,000 and £2,000 a head. Of their total £200m income in the year ended July 2003, £52m came from tuition fees and a further £3.5m from research contracts.
College bursars try to keep an eye on future generations as well as producing current income and say they are having to keep pace with an educational rate of inflation that is 2% higher than the retail price index because so much of their expenditure is on salaries. Traditionally Oxbridge colleges have tended to invest in land and property, which is less volatile than the stock market and brings the prospect of rising rents over time. Property investment has proved a good bet recently, helping the colleges to build up their endowments as well as boosting spending on teaching, research and student accommodation by £66m overall.
Frank Marshall, the bursar of University college, said nearly half the college's investments were in property, ranging from shops and houses in Oxford, to a number of farms. "What these accounts show is a good relationship between the scale of our activities and the endowment at the moment, but there is quite a challenge over the longer term if we are going to maintain that in the face expenses rising faster than inflation. It means we will have to raise donations," said Mr Marshall. He said giving money for bursaries was popular among alumni who felt they had benefited from their college education and wanted others to have the same chance.
| . | Endowment | Operating surplus/deficit | . | Endowment | Operating surplus/deficit | |
| St John's | £202m | -£869,000 | Oriel | £29m | +£1,000 | |
| Christ Church | £173m | +£1,000,000 | St Hilda's | £26m | -£521,000 | |
| All Souls | £129m | -£40,000 | Somerville | £26m | -£233,000 | |
| Magdalen | £102m | -£173,000 | Wadham | £26m | -£331,000 | |
| Nuffield | £101m | -£129,000 | Pembroke | £20m | -£414,000 | |
| Merton | £92m | +£290,000 | St Antony's | £19m | **+£76m | |
| Queen's | £82m | -£233,000 | St Anne's | £18m | +£106 | |
| Jesus | £72m | +£508,000 | Wolfson | £18m | +£30,000 | |
| University | £63m | +£408,000 | Lady Margaret Hall | £17m | +£195,000 | |
| New College | £58m | +£833,000 | St Edmund Hall | £17m | **+£208m | |
| Brasenose | £57m | +£387,000 | Keble | £16m | +£1.4m | |
| Trinity | £45m | +£254,000 | St Peter's | £16m | -£147,000 | |
| Balliol | £40m | -£678,000 | Worcester | £16m | +£27,000 | |
| Corpus Christi | £37m | +£204,000 | St Hugh's | £14m | -£801,000 | |
| Lincoln | £35m | +£338,000 | Mansfield | £5m | -£100,000 | |
| St Catherine's | £33m | +£348,000 | Linacre | £4m | +£159,000 | |
| Exeter | £29m | +£819,000 | Harris Manchester | £1m | -£24,000 | |
| Hertford | £29m | +£773,000 | Templeton | £1m | -£567,000 |
* 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 article, 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.
** These must surely be Oxford mistakes, unless all those terrifically brainy alchemical researchers at St Antony's and Teddy Hall have found a way of turning Thameswater into gold.
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 Daily Telegraph, 8/7/04, The Guardian, 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.