Unis request to raise fees to insane levels

[FlakeSnow]

Fees for 2023 and 2024 are agreed to be £9250. Article below appears to be calling for increase in fees to circa £24k ie on par with overseas students.

Do anyone think this is a remote chance this will happen? My initial reaction is one of horror. (Not read beyond the paywall).

Times uni fees article

Plan 3 ones have interest pegged at inflation so in real terms the graduate will pay back what they borrowed and no more. The price though is an extra 10 years of liability.

It wont go up that much, but I think this is notice that there will be substantial rises in the coming years.

Not least because we are entering an inflationary period, and I don't think the sums will add up at all if inflation erodes the value of the fees.

I work in a RG uni, this year we lose about £3.5k on every home student. It's not sustainable.

At the university I work at it costs approx £11,500 per year to deliver a course. Fees for home students are £9000. The shortfall is made up from overseas students.
We have a huge amount of overseas students and are a ‘rich’ university as a result. The problem arises in our dependency on overseas students. We have seen what Coronavirus has done to free travel. A lot of universities will no longer be willing to gamble on large numbers of overseas students. So yes, I can see an increase in fees for home students.

And if you are wondering where the money goes; the largest expense for most universities are staff pensions. Not a popular notion but absolutely true.

England already has the highest fees in the whole world. This is getting ridiculous

@Lipsandlashes

Many thanks for posting. Thats really interesting. Do you know how much the cost varies between lab based STEM courses (physics, chemistry for example) and the likes of history, business etc?

Does the university need to balance finances between different courses or are there additional government funds for STEM type degrees?

It won't happen overnight and unlikely a big increase this side of a General Election so as to keep the punters happy but after then, who knows? Liz Truss thinks all problems can be solved by tax cuts - a few pence off Income tax and all problems go away! Might as well close the ex-polytechnics to help cut public services just as Rees-Mogg implied recently.

It won't happen overnight and unlikely a big increase this side of a General Election so as to keep the punters happy but after then, who knows? Liz Truss thinks all problems can be solved by tax cuts - a few pence off Income tax and all problems go away! Might as well close the ex-polytechnics to help cut public services just as Rees-Mogg implied recently.

If people keep voting tories yes it might happen. Likely in fact. Along with the demise of NHS and workers rights, maternity leave etc.

They'll go up by £250. Foundation years will be at less than the Augar agreed amount at £7000. We are on our knees.

There are additional funds for science - about £1200 per FT student for non-clinical lab science. A couple of hundred for computer science. Nowhere near enough.

^^ This. That was the whole point of "education, education, education" and the intent to increase the numbers of people with a degree.

At a push I'd agree with a tax, but all of society benefits from being better educated. The current system of loans is abhorrent in my mind and financially inefficient. A tax is easy to understand, and administer.

I was one of the lucky ones who had no fees and what felt at the time like a huge grant. Obviously it wasn't huge, but I got no support from my parents, and got by. I would not have been able to go to university without a grant, because borrowing was not available at that time beyond an overdraft.

This is going to have to happen, regardless of party

And Labour aren't allergic to imposing fees (they introduced them after all)

With inflation at 10%, then its going to need an annual uplift in the region of £1k just to stand still. If courses really are, as pps have said, costing about £11,500, then you'd need to add ay least £5K to fees in 2024 just to cover costs and be inflation-proof.

£14-15k sounds like an enormous increase (as if annual rises in line with inflation follow). But it's a heck of a lot less that a £24k 'softening up' figure.

This exactly.
The students would probably see no difference unless repayments were a much greater percentage of earnings. Very few pay off the loans under the current system and they are written off after 30 years (soon to be 40).

I remember when they introduced university fees. There was such a fuss about scrapping free university level education. The government promised fees would be kept low ie £1k / year and interest would be at inflation level so it was basically interest free.

Huh.

They should have done what Scotland did - far fewer places, only for those who earn them academically, but free.

If they wanna charge American style fees universities will need to offer much better standards of tuition

The current system of loans is abhorrent in my mind and financially inefficient. A tax is easy to understand, and administer

The loans are a tax by any other name. I think we may as well keep the system as is, rather than spend time and effort on creating a new system (of university funding, not just changes to tax).

How it's working now is they are taking in more overseas students so we will train Dr's nurses dentists for other countries nice for the University but not going to help us as a country is it

It's an odd system the max I'll ever earn is £150,000 if I'm lucky

i got the max loan in 30 years if I'd earned £150k constantly I'd have paid £27k off a £60k debt

it feels like that money is going down the drain I'd rather pay a grad tax

It would be dead easy to change. We already get funding based on a banding of cost - needs no legislation at all to change the funding rates, and keep (or preferably reduce) the contribution the student makes. One letter to the OfS saying the settlement for the year is '£x - please distribute all the increase to the Strategic Priorities grant across all price groups.' Job done.

There are huge social and economic benefits for the individual and society of having a highly educated population.
Yes but do we have an objective measure to show that UK population is actually more highly educated since the expansion in degree access rather than just has a higher number of graduates? Or an objective measure of the incremental benefit in socio economics? There certainly does not appear to have been any benefit with regards levelling up for example A level grades of the north with south of UK.

There is evidence on increased earning power of having a degree, yes.

As per I usual Titchy sums it up perfectly.
Universities aren't the bad guys here.

And it is ridiculous that it is estimated that nearly 60% of UK graduates are in jobs that are deemed to be non-graduate roles.

Where did you get this figure from? It's not accurate.

Just checked .....In 2021/22 72.4% of graduates were in professional level jobs 15 months after graduation.
8.8% were in further study.