Tuesday, November 05, 2024
Tuition fees up but is it enough?
The Independent reports that university tuition fees will increase in England for the first time in eight years putting Labour on course for a clash with one of their biggest voter bases, students.
The paper says that fees have been frozen at £9,250 since 2017 but will now rise in line with the Retail Price Index inflation from September 2025, matching them to the current rate of inflation at 2.7 per cent and leading to an increase to around £9,500:
It comes amid growing concern over the state of the education sector, with many universities facing financial crisis. As many as 40 per cent of English universities are expected to fall into a budget deficit this year.
Earlier this year, Universities UK called for tuition fees to be “index-linked to inflation, not to address the funding shortfall, but to allow fee income to maintain its real-terms value over time”.
NUS vice president for higher education, Alex Stanley, said: “Higher education is in crisis right now. Students are being asked to foot the bill to literally keep the lights and heating on in their uni buildings and prevent their courses from closing down. This is - and can only ever be - a sticking plaster. Universities cannot continue to be funded by an ever-increasing burden of debt on students.”
As I pointed out back in August, the big drop in income for universities however, has come about from a drop in the number of international students, who were propping up the sector. Home Office figures from 2024 showed 16 per cent fewer visa applications were made between July and September than in the same period in 2023.
Abolishing the visa restrictions, introduced in January by the Tories, which bar most overseas students from bringing family members to the UK and which is putting off so many students from coming to the UK to study, could have been a win win for colleges, while leaving English students without the extra burden of a fee increase.
Why has the Labour government refused to do this?
