The UK universities cutting geography have lost their bearings
As a discipline, geography is experiencing the same attrition through multiple cuts as everywhere in the UK’s higher education sector – and we are not seeking exceptionalism.
We extend our solidarity to our cognate disciplines and beyond, as they too endure reduced staffing and budgets, face redundancies and restructures and, in some cases, closure and eradication. Nobody wants any of this. But we feel we must call attention to the ways these threats risk undermining the strengths of geography in particular, at a time when the subject is needed most.
Geography shapes how we understand and produce a more sustainable and just world – from the physical processes of environmental change to the dynamics of cultures, societies and economies, and how these interconnect. It is, by design, a holistic, systems-based approach to understanding the world. But its combination of STEM, social science and arts and humanities can sit uneasily within university faculty systems, heightening the risk that we are dismantled into separate components.
Indeed, the disintegration of geography at the University of Leicester is premised on the pretence that it is possible to keep elements of physical geography and deliver undergraduate geography degrees without any human geographers. This fundamentally misunderstands what geography is and why and how it works. It is also senseless in an era when interdisciplinary research and teaching are fundamental to tackling interconnected global challenges.
It is precisely through its breadth – cultural geographers working alongside soil scientists, for example – that geography permits us, and our students, to interrogate complex challenges in innovative, ground-breaking ways. That is why geography leads research in interdisciplinary domains such as climate science, global poverty, plastic pollution, sustainability and geopolitics.
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The threats to university geography departments are even more surprising given the subject’s popularity at school: the number of students taking geography GCSE has increased significantly over the last 15 years, and A level numbers remain strong and stable. Graduate employability rates and income levels are also comparably high.
But the situation within universities is complicated. A snapshot survey of 56 institutions offering geography degrees at UK universities (representing 74 per cent of all geography programmes) reveals that despite fairly stable admissions across the sector, 38 per cent of departments experienced decreased undergraduate numbers in the 2024-25 recruitment round, with the losses felt most acutely in institutions with small numbers (fewer than 20) of geography staff.
By contrast, only 25 per cent of geography departments with more than 40 academic geographers saw enrolment declines. Indeed, just over three-quarters of Russell Group institutions have maintained or grown their geography undergraduate recruitment numbers in the last 12 months.
And while half of Russell Group departments have still felt the need to reduce the number of optional modules available to students, that proportion rises to more than four in five of the smaller departments (the sector-wide proportion is around two-thirds).
There is also a worrying regional inequality in who has access to geography at university; a concern already raised by the British Academy in its report Cold spots: Mapping inequality in SHAPE provision in UK higher education. The underserving of certain regions impacts the most disadvantaged students – who also rely on the lower-tariff provision of non-Russell group institutions.
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This growing inequity is best demonstrated by the struggle to retain field-class teaching – a Quality Assurance Agency requirement and a distinctive strength of geography in enhancing skills and employability. Changes in recent years have been rightly motivated by environmental and inclusivity concerns, changing to UK locations (23 per cent of universities) and non-residential versions (20 per cent). But budget constraints are also shortening the length of trips now (38 per cent), especially in Wales and the north of England; departments in London, the South, and Scotland have been less affected. Unsurprisingly, Russell Group departments are the most insulated from change; indeed, 83 per cent are still able to offer additional, optional field-classes.
We reiterate that none of this is to suggest that geography is uniquely or disproportionately affected by the current problems. No subject or university is entirely insulated from the pickle in which UK higher education find itself thanks to extreme marketisation, stagnating student fees, steady decreases in centralised funding and a frenzied debate around student visas and immigration.
But the cuts to geography are especially hard to take, not only because it is our subject but also because it is happening at a time when bookshops, TV screens, social media and museums are increasingly filled with treatise, tales and testimonies about maps and mappings, the Earth, environmental change and nature writing, contemporary geopolitics and new imperialisms, urban worlds and social inequalities.
These issues – and the list goes on – reflect many of the challenges that humanity faces right now. And these are the topics that geographers research and teach. This is what our students are passionate about.
Geographical training and knowledge, in short, is more important than ever. We say this loudly and clearly, lest our universities forget.
Jenny Pickerill is professor of environmental geography at the University of Sheffield and vice president for research and higher education at the Royal Geographical Society.
Beth Greenhough is professor of human geography at the University of Oxford.
Peter Hopkins is professor of social geography and a Leverhulme major research fellow at Newcastle University.
Tariq Jazeel is professor of human geography at UCL.
Jamie Woodward is professor of physical geography at the University of Manchester.