Gown and out: are British universities broke?

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• 00:09

  Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from The Economist.

• 00:13

  I'm Jason Palmer.

• 00:15

  And I'm Rosie Bloor.

• 00:16

  Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

• 00:24

  China's officials rarely encourage local and regional rivalries.

• 00:28

  But a wildly popular new amateur football league seems to have the party's blessing,

• 00:34

  possibly because it's bringing some much needed economic activity.

• 00:39

  And Superman has been standing up for truth, justice and the American way for almost nine decades.

• 00:46

  With a rebooted film out,

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  our correspondent asks what the Caped Wonders crime fighting tells us about US foreign policy.

• 01:09

  But first...

• 01:10

  Britain's universities are more broke than a student who's just spent the summer inter-railing around Europe.

• 01:16

  Mark Johnson is a senior editor at The Economist.

• 01:20

  The regulator reckons that 4 in 10 universities are running deficits this year and universities are making big cuts to make their budgets work.

• 01:30

  Mark, we're always being told how brilliant British universities are.

• 01:33

  Why are they in such financial trouble?

• 01:36

  Well,

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  the main thing they've been struggling with is the tuition fee that is paid by domestic students,

• 01:42

  by British students, has been frozen for close to a decade, a little bit longer than that.

• 01:47

  So it's been eaten away by inflation.

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