After two years of pandemic-induced disruption, students at UK universities were hoping this term that things were slowly returning to normal.

But life may soon get much worse again and this time it has nothing to do with Covid-19.

Ballots on strike action by lecturers have been called at UK universities. The issue is pensions; more precisely, whether the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) — the largest pension scheme in the UK with 470,000 members and £85bn in assets — has sufficient funds to pay the pensions promised to lecturers.

Both the USS trustees and the Pensions Regulator think not, and have proposed that the pension contributions increase and that future pension benefits become less generous to bring the scheme back into balance.

The lecturers’ union — the UCU — believes this is unnecessary and that the scheme has more than enough assets to make good on pension promises without either an increase in contributions or a cut to benefits.

The sides in this debate seem to be talking about two completely different realities — one in which the scheme is comfortably in surplus and one in which the deficit (the gap between assets and what is needed to make good on past pension promises) is huge. Both sides seem unable to talk in a common language. This makes strike action — which would be a disaster for students — likely.

The reason this disagreement shows no signs of resolution is that a discussion which is really all about risk — the risk that assets might not be sufficient to pay pension promises because asset returns turn out to be disappointing — is couched in terms that ignore risk. The question has become one about how big is “the deficit” (or “the surplus”) — a question which compares current assets with some single estimate of the value of future pensions to be paid.

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