The University of Aberdeen has announced it needs to make further job cuts as it tries to bring its deficit down to ?6.5 million.

Just over a year after the Scottish institution was embroiled in a row over plans to close some of its languages degrees, principal and vice-chancellor George Boyne has told staff it needs to shave ?5.5 million in costs to reach its target.

Aberdeen also needs to look again at its course portfolio, Boyne said, pointing out that of its 1,000 postgraduate taught courses, currently 25 per cent have five or fewer students and of its 1,442 undergraduate courses,16 per cent have five or fewer students.

¡°It is important that we create a more financially and academically sustainable and efficient portfolio of degree programmes and courses that attract larger numbers of students,¡± Boyne said in the update.

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In 2024, the university faced a backlash after announcing that it had to close all single and joint honour programmes in languages. It eventually backed down and retained some of the courses but its accounts later revealed that there had been ¡°significant doubt¡± over whether it could continue as a going concern.

Boyne said that the university¡¯s court had agreed for it to operate with a ?6.5 million deficit in the coming academic year.

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¡°This is helpful in allowing us more time to respond to the reduced financial circumstances of the sector which have been caused by factors such as the restrictions on international student recruitment imposed by the previous UK Government and by more than a decade of real-terms decline in the funding of our Scottish undergraduate students.¡±

Cuts equating to 2 per cent of the university¡¯s total revenue need to be made to get to this level of deficit however, he said, and the university has opened voluntary severance and enhanced retirement schemes affecting departments including business; geosciences; language, literature, music and visual culture; natural and computing sciences; and social sciences.

Boyne said that workloads of academic and professional services staff were ¡°unnecessarily high where we are running degrees and courses that attract small numbers of students¡±.

¡°Our staff are undoubtedly working incredibly hard to teach, assess, and support our students but are stretched across too many small courses and degree programmes,¡± he added.

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Responding to the news, Mary Senior, the Scotland official at the University and College Union said it was an ¡°extremely worrying time for staff at the university, especially those in the areas targeted for voluntary severance¡±.?

¡°If the university is supposed to be pulling together as a community, workers are asking why the burden of job losses are falling disproportionately on a small number of academic schools,¡± she added.

Senior claimed that staff were concerned that they had not been appropriately consulted on the proposals, indicating that lessons had not been learned from the last set of cuts.

¡°This new round of job cuts comes on the back of a pause in academic promotions, which has already dented staff morale,¡± she added. ¡°So to be told that staff costs are spiralling, when the reality is university workers' pay has declined by over 25 per cent in real terms since 2009 is a further slap in the face to our members.¡±

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tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com