With multimillion-pound donations and highly profitable publishing and examinations arms pushing its endowment above ?4 billion, the University of Cambridge is viewed enviously by most higher education leaders. Yet the institution’s current vice-chancellor, Deborah Prentice, might be forgiven for viewing things slightly differently, having arrived almost two years ago from Princeton University, whose endowment stands at a whopping $34 billion (?25 billion) – higher on a per-undergraduate basis than Harvard’s much-contested fund even before the latter was targeted for huge funding cuts by the Trump administration.
Prentice, who spent her entire academic career at Princeton before becoming provost in 2017, is at pains to stress that she recognises Cambridge’s privileged position within a UK higher education landscape beset by financial challenges. “We are not in the same financial position as most of the sector because we have different sources of income,” she reflected, speaking to Times Higher Education in her walnut-panelled office next to Cambridge’s Senate House.
But Cambridge is not entirely immune to the effects of stagnating tuition fees and research funding. In the 2024-25 financial year, the university’s operating deficit widened to ?100 million (from ?75 million the previous year), according to , and while the executive insists that this is manageable given Cambridge’s plentiful income streams, an has called for clearer direction on how the funding gap (costed at ?53 million using a different calculation) will be closed.
At the same time, the university is being urged in some quarters to do more to relieve the pressures on Cambridge’s myriad early-career researchers, who struggle to afford the city’s sky-high rents or to get a mortgage given their temporary employment status. More permanent research and teaching posts have been called for, along with improved pay for the postgraduates and visiting academics who help supervise its undergraduates.
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One unexpected new strain on Cambridge’s finances is the government’s proposed levy on international student fees, which brought in ?191.7 million for the university in 2024-25 – 14 per cent of its ?1.4 billion income. If a rumoured 6 per cent levy was imposed and Cambridge did not increase fees, the policy would cost the university about ?11.5 million annually, based on last year’s income.
“It was a surprise,” reflected Prentice on the proposal, which was included in an immigration White Paper that also outlined plans to to 18 months. “We depend on being able to bring talent from every corner of the world, and those people are critical to our success and the UK’s success. Anything that challenges that [mobility] is difficult – there are already a number of financial stresses and this would be another one.”
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But she is non-committal about whether Cambridge would protect its income by raising that, for 2025 entry, stand at ?41,124 a year for science-based courses and ?70,554 for medicine. “I don’t know what we’d do,” she said. International fees are “getting expensive, and we are sensitive to that. We will see what happens.”
Arguably a bigger financial headache for Cambridge is the current domestic tuition fee. This autumn, the maximum tuition fee will rise for the first time since 2017 to ?9,535 a year, up from ?9,250, but university leaders note this increase does little to cover the true costs of teaching, which Universities UK estimates is between ?12,000 and ?13,000 a year on average. Cambridge’s loss on its undergraduate teaching is much higher, however; the cost of teaching a student in the tutorial system is likely to be somewhere between ?23,000 and ?27,000 a year on average based on an inflation-uprated figure of ?18,000, the estimate calculated in 2016.
With Cambridge and others losing so much money on?their undergraduate teaching, some have argued that higher fees for certain UK research universities are the only answer, potentially decoupled from state loans. Prentice is unconvinced that this is the right course, however. “I cannot imagine that here,” she said.
For one thing, Prentice argues that the idea of different fees for different universities would harm the cohesiveness of the UK sector. “The market logic is clear [that Cambridge could apply higher fees] but we are very close to our peers in the sector – all those decisions that we make on undergraduate fees and staff salaries…are very joined up,” she said. And that cohesiveness, overseen by the pan-sectoral representative body, Universities UK, is a “huge strength”, she believes, in comparison with the “very heterogeneous” and atomised US higher education landscape.
“In tough times, we depend on those other institutions so we wouldn’t make decisions for our interests alone,” she said.
The interests of students from all backgrounds also inform Prentice’s thinking on fees. Unusually for an Oxbridge vice-chancellor, she has visited many state schools across the UK , including to so-called higher education cold spots to encourage potential applicants: “There is talent there and we’re not [currently] getting it.” But she worries that her efforts to widen participation would be undermined by higher fees.
But widening participation is also held back by Cambridge’s relatively low number of undergraduate admissions, which are controlled by its 31 separate colleges. Indeed, while proportional admission of state school undergraduates is increasing at some colleges, their overall numbers are not ,?owing to reduced overall admission of UK students. The trend for admitting more higher-paying international students instead was by Conservative education spokesman Neil O’Brien.
So might imposing higher fees on wealthier domestic students, as happens at Princeton, help to persuade the colleges to expand admissions, including those from under-represented backgrounds?
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“I don’t think we need a huge expansion to provide opportunity across the country,” countered Prentice, noting “modest increases” in enrolments at some colleges.
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Prentice has also been busy in recent months welcoming “half a dozen” government ministers to the research facilities that the Labour government hopes will spearhead its drive for economic growth. Those visitors included Treasury minister Spencer Livermore, who opened the , the new home of the physics department’s fabled Cavendish Laboratory; chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden, who visited the university’s supercomputer, science secretary Peter Kyle, AI minister Feryal Clark and science minister Patrick Vallance.
Vallance has championed the Oxford-Cambridge “growth corridor”, the 66 mile-long swathe of Middle England where a significant number of the 1.5 million homes planned for the UK by 2030 will be built to support the area’s life sciences and green technology industries. For Prentice, the initiative could usefully look to Kendall Square – the innovation hub in the other Cambridge, in Massachusetts, which was transformed, with considerable input from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from a derelict industrial wasteland into a thriving biomedical quarter.
Cambridge’s own biotech scene is already Europe’s largest, estimated to turn over about ?7 billion a year. But Prentice is clear that the arc as a whole has some distance to go to reach Kendall Square heights – a district?that employs some , plus many thousands more in related academic, financial and professional service jobs.
“We think we are where Kendall Square was in 2000, maybe 2010. But that is what the Oxford-Cambridge Arc could be,” she said. “We have the high research intensity, but we are still relatively small – there is the opportunity to bring in more multinationals but also have the endless co-creation spaces and labs.”
In addition, a Cambridge-Oxford “co-branded” initiative, similar to MIT and Harvard’s biomedically focused Broad Institute, could also be on the cards, she suggested. “We’ve not graduated to that level, but we could do it – having Cambridge and Oxford working together could be very promising,” she said.
The idea of better connecting up Oxford and Cambridge – previously known as the Oxford-Cambridge Arc – has been around for many years. But Prentice is confident that Labour’s economic focus, reflected in the new “Growth Corridor” name – will finally see some serious government money put into realising the aspiration; she would be “surprised if we get nothing” in next month’s spending review.
Either way, Prentice is keen to ensure that the next phase of Cambridge’s development is managed better than the expansion of recent years, which has seen many young researchers priced out of the city by higher-earning computer programmers and biotech employees, forcing them to commute from far-flung villages on the city’s congested roads. With the previous Conservative administration stating its desire for Cambridge to double in size by , concerns over traffic and water shortages have been regularly discussed in the city, which was regarded until the 1990s as little more than an attractive East Anglian market town, albeit with a famous university.
“We are keen to make sure the next phase of Cambridge’s growth corrects some of the recent growth which was largely unplanned – it’s a huge issue for us,” Prentice says, noting that she is in regular contact with former 91茄子s England boss Peter Freeman, now chair of the Cambridge Growth Company, on how new homes can be delivered. “Inequality in the city is something that concerns us, particularly as it makes it harder to bring outstanding people into the city,” she added.
Ultimately, she is determined to show Cambridge residents “why it is great to live in this environment”, with a world-class university on their doorstep. “The right questions to ask” in that regard include “How does it make your healthcare better or the education in your school better?” The university’s planned specialist children’s hospital, due to begin construction next year, is a good example of the university’s local impact, she added.
Local impact and widening participation might be thought to be unlikely focuses from a leader whose recruitment as a complete outsider – despite her widely accepted achievements at Princeton – was not appreciated by everyone within Cambridge’s complex academic ecosystem. Her predecessor, Canadian legal scholar Stephen Toope, fell foul of dons over mandating “respectful” dialogue and a quickly-abandoned website , while New Zealander John Hood with proposed governance reforms in 2006 while he was vice-chancellor.
Prentice takes a conciliatory tone regarding Cambridge’s traditions, professing that she “loves the college system”, even while noting that it entails a “super-decentralised” decision-making structure that contrast sharply with the “centralised” governance system she was used to at Princeton. That said, she is overseeing to the way cross-subsidies flow around the Cambridge system to encourage schools to take more responsibility for keeping operating deficits in check. This, she claims, will “enable us to bring down costs and pursue revenue enhancement”. Schools “could expand, but it would be on the basis of academic opportunity” rather than budget concerns. And while the schools have been asked to make efficiency savings of 5 per cent by the end of 2025-26, there will be “no secret second stage” of cost-cutting, she insists.
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Prentice has kept a fairly low profile since her arrival in July 2023, particularly compared with her Oxford counterpart Irene Tracey. Recruited around the same time from within Oxford, Tracey soon authored a well-received government report on spin-outs and has become a familiar face on parliamentary select committees; she even guest-edited BBC Radio 4 Today’s programme before Christmas. But with the government’s high hopes for the Oxbridge corridor and the sector’s financial travails starting to bite even at its two august termini, it seems likely that we will be hearing more from Cambridge’s 347th?vice-chancellor in the coming months and years.
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