So the government had budgeted an average of £7.5K for fees

[easterbunnyhopsback]

What will happen now, if most unis charging £9K?

With a bit of luck our DCs will be taught properly.

But how will the government afford to pay an extra 20% up front?

grovel .

There is a reason that the term is "reading" for a degree - it involves work on behalf of the student, not just the academics i.e. the clue is in the name, they are supposed to read.

At £9k per year for science degrees, students get fantastic value for money as they have 30+ contact hours per week, plus lab classes (not cheap to run, equipment not cheap to maintain, technicians and postgaduate teaching assistants essential to help ensure student safety).

How the government will afford the extra 20% up front has yet to be seen. I suspect/hope there may be something of a re-think .

It isn't yet clear that the government will have to find an extra 20% up front. Less than half of all universities responded to the BBC survey. The survey suggested an average fee of £8536. That suggests the government will have to find an extra 14% up front but doesn't take into account bursaries for poorer students. Since some universities will be giving poorer students £6000 per year towards their fees, that could bring the average down somewhat. We'll know more by mid-July when all universities will have published their fees.

Would the discounted fee be used in the average? How could they do that? I would have thought the published fee would be used to calculate the 'average' fee, whether a bursary be available or not.

Doesn't the £6K bursary come from the government loan to the university?

7.5 k for whom?For those on a low income??

No, on the news tonight they said that the gvmt had set the uni fee budget at an expected average of £7.5K per student. As prh says above - a BBC survey suggested that the average fee will be around £8.5K, although less than half of all unis responded.
As they will be paying university fees up front, the gvmt will need to find a substantial amount of money to fund the difference between £7.5k per year and £8.5K+ per year.

Does that make 250,000 students x 1K = £250M....? per year? over budget?

about thick bursary comment! Going back to that, would the uni report £9K and £3K fees separately?

Sorry, I really don't understand...... obviously

grovel, you do realise that universitites have always charged high fees, but that until now the government subsidised the less well-off

because from your post it sounds like you didn't realise that

it sounds like you thought the unis didn't charge high enough fees to offer a good education

easterbunnyhopsback - There are two averages being talked about which confuses things somewhat.

The BBC survey only looked at the average headline fee. So if a university says it will charge £9000 per annum for all its courses, the BBC will say that the average fee for that university is £9000.

However, what matters in terms of the government's finances is the average fee the government has to fund. Any university charging a fee of over £6000 must provide support for poorer students. So in effect the bursaries come from the tuition fees paid by the better off students.

To illustrate, imagine a university which sets its fee at £9000 for all courses. Let us imagine that it only takes 100 students. If 75 of them pay the full fee whilst the other 25 get a £6000 discount, the total cost will work out at £7500 per student and the government's budget will be fine. I'm not saying these figures are realistic, by the way. I used them simply to make the calculations easy!

Thanks prh - I knew I could depend on you to explain it!

So really the BBC headline is a bit shock-horror and we will only have realistic figures when the unis publish number of bursaries they're offering and the size of the discount?

But it's still bad news for those not on FSM?

Yes and no!

For a start it depends on how the universities define poorer students. That may be FSM or they may use some other measures.

It also depends on how much the student earns after graduation. Despite the higher fees, graduates on lower incomes will end up paying less per year and less in total than current graduates. However, graduates on higher incomes will pay more in total than current graduates although they will still be paying less per year.

I thought I'd read somewhere that it was only going to be children on FSM who would get bursaries. I must have misread it.

Surely, at the moment, they can ony work out average fees on the basis of money paid to the unis by the government, but, in 30 years' time, they'll be know the actual rate of return, and will therefore be able to calculate the size of the average university fee in 2012. (?)

Is there a list of Which Unis replied to the BBC survey? I wonder if the replies were skewed towards Unis which are more likely to charge higher, anyway (ie, not ex-Polys).

List

I'm pretty sure that the government £7500 was before any bursaries were taken off. There has been a large amount of discussion in the educational press about how they've got their sums wrong.

If you ran a university and were being offered £9k a student, when most of your government funding was being taken away, why would you charge less? It's like advertising that you're not quite as good as all the others...

Okay, I recognised 16 of those 47 (about 33%) in that list that were ex-Polys.
Plus you really need to know how many students will be on 9k courses, not just number of universities.
Wiki Estimates 84 University institutions in the UK, of which 38 are expolys (45% of the total), so BBC survey results are not obviously closely representing all types of Uni, never mind all types of of courses.

Looks like the government miscalculated, badly. Which is what governments tend to do. This is going to be ruddy expensive for all of us, given the government has to fund the upfront costs until former students start paying back. Great, so we've got a system which may well be MORE expensive for the taxpayer AND for the student.

Ruddy Nick Clegg, what an arse!

Well, OneMoreMum, the universities have to cover their costs for the courses somehow. The government seemed to expect the universities to run at a loss, but whether a course is offered from an ex-poly or an old-university, there are still staff to be paid, buildings costs, insurances, library costs, lab costs etc etc etc etc (although there probably are many more staff higher on the payscale at an old university), but at either type of instutution, there will be costs which need to be covered.

It's too soon to tell what the average fees will be. Unis might charge different fees for different courses, and they might not charge all students on a course the same fees. But I'd be surprised if the average came in as low as £7500 or if many students only had to pay £3000. £6000 fee waivers will be very rare.

If there is a shortfall, the government has threatened to claw it back by removing the remaining 20% tuition fee subsidy.