Adelaide Uni makes $41m surplus but international student pain yet to be fully felt

Staff sacrifice helped Adelaide Uni absorbed the financial pain of last year, with the uni making a $41m surplus. But a dire lack of overseas students means another tough year.

The University of Adelaide made a $41 million surplus for 2020 – in line with the average of the past few years – after staff took a hit to their pay and donors came to the rescue.

But a bleak outlook remains while international student enrolments are squeezed out by Covid-19 travel bans, vice-chancellor Peter Hoj says.

“In simplistic terms, the university’s financial result for 2020 looks better than expected, but the global pandemic has caused a much more complex and challenging situation than these numbers show,” Professor Hoj said.

Before the pandemic, the university had expected its revenue would grow above $1 billion, helping cement the education sector as South Australia’s biggest export earner.

When borders shut, university staff agreed to take unpaid leave to save jobs or took redundancies while the uni paused infrastructure projects and other expenditure, saving $90 million.

Adelaide University vice-chancellor Peter Hoj. Picture Mark Brake

The uni attracted a record $234 million for research, up from $185 million in 2019, helping push revenue to $977 million for the year.

A record 1600 donors made philanthropic donations and bequests totalling about $10 million.

“After the pandemic hit, the university’s financial position for 2020 fell well short of its initial targeted revenue projections,” Prof Hoj said.

“This would have placed the institution under much greater financial stress had it not been for the university management’s swift action – and the support of our staff – to implement a range of savings measures.

“The university saw a reduction in the number of new international students enrolling in semester 2, 2020.

“This has led to an ongoing reduction in the pipeline of international students, which means that our university’s finances will be impacted very dramatically in the coming years.

“The real concern for Australia is that 2021 international commencements in universities appear to be down by 37 per cent and are currently down by 17 per cent in semester 1 at Adelaide University, with strong indications of significant further deterioration.

“This will lead to sustained losses for Australian universities for at least three years.

“Without a rapid opening of borders to international students, this will be exacerbated to what could be crisis-like dimensions that will threaten the country’s research base dramatically, at a time when we are looking to utilise it to pivot to a more resilient economy with enhanced sovereign capability.”

Prof Hoj said the underlying net operating result was $9.3 million.

Extraordinary items that boosted that to $41 million included the donations, and $20 million to establish the immunoGENomics Cancer Institute.

In 2019, the uni recorded a surplus of $42.9 million.

In that year, there were 22,181 full-time equivalent students at the uni, of which 7148 were internationals drawn from 107 different countries.

In the five years from 2015 to 2019, its average annual surplus was about $43.5 million as revenue climbed steadily toward the $1 billion mark.

Adelaide is the last of the three main unis to report 2020 results.

UniSA recorded a surplus of $21 million on revenue of $696 million.

Flinders made a $35 million surplus with a strong gain in research revenue.