They're really not, especially not money without strings attached (there's a lot of money in research, and lot gets wasted, but that's partly because the broken process of grant funding means that you can't just take the money and spend it on useful things, you have to spend it on the grant even if it's not necessary). The fact is that home student tuition fees don't pay for the cost of teaching an average degree, and foreign student fees pay a fairly large multiple of that, so it's hard to see how that isn't effectively a subsidy, anyway, even if the universities have other income streams which also subsidize those degrees.
Everything thinks of Oxbridge (which are not representative of most universities) as being really rich, but even then it's maybe a few of the colleges that spend a lot of their money propping up the rest of them (the average oxbridge college has some very old and very expensive to maintain buildings and more or less has to beg alumni for that money).
Everything thinks of Oxbridge (which are not representative of most universities) as being really rich, but even then it's maybe a few of the colleges that spend a lot of their money propping up the rest of them (the average oxbridge college has some very old and very expensive to maintain buildings and more or less has to beg alumni for that money).