Is the reputation and scale of the University’s operations too big to continue?
This year marks the 575th anniversary of the founding of the University of Glasgow by Papal Bull, issued by Pope Nicholas V. The University touts itself as the home of ‘World Changers’ – a big ask for all of its incoming and outgoing students, especially in a turbulent world marked by rapid technological change and political upheaval that is seeing the destruction of the current establishment and societal norms. Currently, the University is continuing its campus developments in Gilmorehill, Garscube, and Dumfries, costing several millions.
It cannot be doubted that the University of Glasgow is a very important institution, worthy of its reputation, and one that is capable of punching above its weight in many areas. But has this caused the University to get too big for its boots? Did the University get too big, too fast?
Currently, as of the 2025/26 academic year, the University of Glasgow has a total 34,983 students studying here. With the intake of students growing each year, the University of Glasgow surpasses some of the most decorated institutions like the University of Oxford, which has a total of 26,800 students as of 2025. That is a lot of students to serve with a high-quality of teaching and a lot to assess correctly. Research has proven that a smaller student-to-teacher ratio allows more time for teachers to engage in a closer working relationship with their students and students are better engaged with the course material. Unfortunately, in June 2026, the University announced it was setting up a voluntary redundancy scheme for its staff in response to a projected declining intake of international students. Professor Andy Schofield, Principal of the University, acknowledged that this would “have implications for the size of our workforce, affecting both academic and professional services roles.” This scheme sets a precedent for the future of the University’s workforce: if not enough staff accept voluntary redundancy, it is possible that the University could be forced to cut staff. With fewer staff to teach, a significant level of strain will be placed on the existing workforce who will be left with a heavier teaching, administrative, and assessment workload that will cause more harm than good to both staff and students.
Compared across three university league tables – QS World University Rankings 2026 (published 2025), The Times Higher Education Report 2026, and The Guardian University Guide 2026 – the University falls within the top 100 for each list. However, The Guardian University Guide notes a decline in the University’s ranking between 2025 and 2026, from 14 to 24 with 86.9% of students satisfied with the quality of teaching. The Times Higher Education, however, signals that only 50.6% were satisfied with teaching and places the University at 84th in the table. The QS World University ranking places the University at 79th. Obviously, the true quality of teaching and the experience of university education cannot be deduced from a statistic alone. Each of us has our own experience with our education, depending on our degree programme, our lecturers and tutors, our assessments, and so on.
Like all other Scottish universities, Glasgow must also fund the significant gap left by the Scottish Government’s free tuition policy. Inevitably, the University will want to recruit as many international students as possible to help plug this gap. But these statistics at least highlight that Glasgow, for all it boasts about itself, is not as high up as what it would like you to think, at least for a Russell Group university. The University Alliance, in a 2023 report, found higher levels of satisfaction in non-Russell Group universities. Most people dispute the prestige that comes with a Russell Group, arguing that it has little bearing on graduate outcomes or quality of education – The Guardian University Guide 2024 found several members of the Russell Group below the top 10.
So does this mean Glasgow is a ‘bad’ university? No. But it does bring into question the prestigious status and reputation that surrounds the University that it continually boasts in its marketing. Obviously Glasgow would want to attract as many of the best as it could – when you were host to such figures as Lord Kelvin, John Logie Baird, Adam Smith, and Edwin Morgan, of course you would want to maintain that succession of revolutionary thinkers. But marketing yourself as the best doesn’t entail that you will receive the best, in students or in teaching quality.
It is uncertain, amidst the higher education funding crisis and the turmoil underway in the job market, what Glasgow’s future could look like. The University may be forced to downsize its international student body; cut research and postgraduate programmes; cut undergraduate degree programmes. It could be forced to ravage its way through every area of the University, like the University of Edinburgh had done to plug its debt. If it continues to be overambitious in its operations, it may end up close to bankruptcy, like the University of Dundee. More importantly, how do you prove the value of higher education in a world where technology is threatening to outsource most of our thinking and storing of knowledge, where it is making the learning of new skills redundant?
Glasgow’s overambitious attitude may have helped to propel it to new heights, but it now may become its undoing if it’s not careful.
