Tuition fees increase

[Cartwrightandson]

How are you all feeling about the news? Happy? Relieved? Too little too late?

It’s actually not quite enough. But better than nothing.

Maybe I take too much to heart the whingeing on MN in the Higher Education section where the “sharp-elbowed” middle classes congregate …

Expected - after all Tony Blair’s Labour Party brought in tuition fees in the first place.

Nowhere near enough. I wish they would push them up higher but massively decrease the interest rate on loans.

Torn. As an academic I know how dire university funding is, and that this isn't actually enough to fix that (and I'm in NI where fees are under £5k so the funding gap is enormous here). But as someone who didn't pay fees at college in Ireland, I wish young people could have the same opportunities I did.

Too little too late. I don't see that this is going to make any real difference to a sector in crisis. Universities will still be making a loss on home undergraduates and, thanks to the government, struggling to attract overseas ones.

well it just about balances out the increase in NI contributions in the budget.

policies like tuition fees should always have had an index-linked increase built in every year. it is crazy that they stay level for years (as inflation goes up) and then have to have a massive increase to catch up. And that means there is a political row every time the fee changes.

if things like fees were index linked, they would go up a bit each year (in a fairly predictable way) which would be much easier.

The whole system of fees is crazy in various other ways, and ideally there would be a different way to fund universities (e.g. graduate tax). but that is a much bigger debate.

Won’t balance it in our place. NI changes will cost circa £10m; student fees increase will be £1.6 mill approx.