OXFORD University's 36 colleges have published their standard audited accounts for the first time* - and they show almost half of them are in the red.
The richest college is St John's with capital assets, excluding money it receives from the Government, of £202m. Poorest are Templeton and Harris Manchester, with capital assets of £1m. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge have agreed to publish accounts in a bid to prove to the Government that they manage their private funding well and, therefore, deserve the extra public funding they receive over and above other universities.
Oxford University colleges have built combined capital assets of more than £l.6bn in land, property, shares and cash deposits. The Government is keen to see it raise yet more finance from such sources as endowments from past students. The colleges reaped an 8.9 per cent return on capital of which about four per cent was spent with the rest being added to college funds as a hedge against inflation.
The Labour Government, elected in 1997, promised to re-examine the basis for paying extra taxpayers' money (known as the college fee) to the nation's two most ancient universities. Now it has agreed to leave present arrangements in place until 2008 when the question of the college fee will be reviewed again. Despite their independent riches, 15 Oxford colleges spent more money than they received in 2002-3.
Dame Fiona Caldicott, principal of Somerville College and chairman of the conference of colleges which coordinates policies, said that in many cases colleges were running on a deficit because of a shortfall between the money which is received from the Government and the real cost of Oxford University degree courses, which are based on one-to-one tutorials. She added: "Income on endowments and other activities are used by the colleges to try to make Oxford academic salaries more competitive, although we realise they cannot match those paid by the leading US institutions. Vital financial input from the colleges also allows Oxford to maintain the tutorial system, the strengths of which are reflected in our high completion rates and the regard in which recruiters hold our graduates."
Colleges at Cambridge University, which is far wealthier than Oxford, also plan to publish standard audited accounts later this year.
* 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.
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 Guardian, 8/7/04, The Daily Telegraph, 8/7/04. 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.