There’s an astonishing story on the front page of today’s Sunday Times: university vice-chancellors are lobbying for tuition fees to be increased to £24,000 a year. This is after two years in which universities across the U.K. transformed themselves into Chinese-style internment camps in which everyone had to be vaccinated, students were confined to their rooms, there was no face-to-face contact with academic staff and they were forced to endure endless Zoom calls in which they were lectured about ’white privilege’ and ‘unconscious bias’ and bombarded with woke propaganda. Oh, and when students were let out of their rooms they had to wear masks to symbolise their obeisance to the university authorities. Anyone breaching the rules was expelled, with many universities refusing to reimburse students for any rent or fees paid up front.
Now, the people responsible for turning our universities into these hell-holes want to almost triple the annual tuition fees. Are they trolling us? The Sunday Times has more.
University bosses are calling for tuition fees to be raised closer to the £24,000 a year average that foreign students pay.
They warn the £9,250 paid by U.K. students, which has been frozen for a decade, is forcing them to take on an ever-increasing number of foreign applicants from countries such as China and India.
A record one in five young undergraduates starting at top universities this autumn are from overseas, according to official figures, up 7% in a year. The number of British undergraduates has declined by 13%.
School pupils received their A-level results last week, triggering a battle for higher education places and vice-chancellors have been urged to take on more domestic applicants to ease the pressure.
However, Sir David Bell, Cice-Chancellor at the University of Sunderland and a former permanent secretary at the Department for Education, said: “You cannot expect to run universities on a fee level of £9,250 a year, which by 2025 will be worth around £6,000 in real terms because of inflation.
“If you want to keep running universities even at the level we have now, you have to increase the tuition fee at some point.”
He said universities were simply making “a rational choice” in supplementing their finances with income from overseas students.
Bell said he would like to be able to recruit foreign students “as a matter of choice, not simply because there is a financial imperative to do it”, adding: “Universities cannot afford not to take more overseas students.”
Professor Colin Riordan, Cice-Chancellor of Cardiff University, said the government had a “national duty to ensure that it was at least viable for us to teach students from this country”.
Professor Sir Chris Husbands, vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, said: “There are high-tariff universities [which ask for very high A-level grades] pulling back from the UK market because they can charge higher prices in international markets. There is an urgent need to look at UK student funding.”
Stephen Marston, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Gloucester, said he and other vice-chancellors in England wanted to get into talks with government for a “long-term viable funding model for universities”. Until then, he said, “we are likely to see increasing recruitment of overseas students”.
The most selective institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol, turned away four out of 10 U.K. candidates who applied to start a degree course this autumn, according to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS). This is the highest rejection rate ever recorded.
Overseas students are being enrolled at a higher rate than British ones at the most elite universities, according to a new analysis of admissions data by the consultancy DataHE.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Telegraph has interviewed some students who want a refund, given that their university education has been disrupted by over-the-top Covid restrictions and striking lecturers.
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If they think their courses are worth it then they should provide the finance for the loans themselves (or via their brokers) and let the free market decide. If I understand correctly, the only reason that they can get away with these demands is that the money for domestic students is provided by taxpayers (via the arms length Student Loans Company) and the risk of non-payment on the University is negligible, as the taxpayer is again liable.
Yes indeed- the taxpayer pays via student “loans” that are largely written off rather than repaid – and will be even more so if the fees increase further
Agree. The academics have no “skin in the game”. See https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01079/
Currently the student loan book is £182 billion, expected to rise to £460 billion by the mid 2040s. Madness. When banks mis-sold worthless insurance they got held to account with the PPI scandal. When Volkswagen sold sub-legal quality cars we get DieselGate. Academia is selling worthless sub-par product with huge tax payer subsidy to (mostly) naive 18 year old consumers. The proposed increase in tuition fees could double the UKs’ national debt! And yet this is NOT MY BIGGEST CONCERN… The elephant in the living room is the hijacking of the destiny of the nation’s youth by a bunch of raving academics. What could these prospects have realised without such misdirection. Maybe a Pimlico plumber earning more than the prime minister could supply an answer.
Yes, I cannot help but think that another crash/scandal is right here in the making. The sums are terrifying.
Many university teachers are set in their ways, provide poor value for their salaries and pension costs and have not modernised with the times.
As with schools, a great deal of the syllabus can be recorded by able presenters using easy to follow, well structured text and graphics. These could save tutor time and help poorer students revise or sick ones catch up.
While universities cannot be called by that name if there is no face to face tuition, there is a great deal in many courses that is readily handled in the ways professional training, compliance training etc are done with online instruction modules and testing.
Having seen my daughters graduate this year, one an MSc from a ‘modern uni’ and the other a BSc from a ‘Russell Group uni’, and sat through the graduation ceremonials, I can tell you that British graduates, especially white British graduates, are already well into being a minority in those collecting awards.
If so, then the Universities are already selling a lot of their courses (anecdotally, i would have said a third) to foreign students at well over the base number of £9250. But then again they seem to be overwhelmed by the Diversity cult. Do any of them look at what they are spending on useless bureaucracy..? They also seem sufficiently well endowed to buy all the buildings in area and have lovely new ones built too, with comfortable provision for the well-padded. Perhaps trying to out-do each other with the effectiveness of their teaching, and not ‘safe spaces’ and award winning architecture might be a way to go.?
There’s something wrong with the UK’s HE sector. I’m sure this is to do with rampant oversupply in many specialities (and undersupply in others, notably medicine).
For some reason this sector has managed to get the state to fund 50% of our youngsters to stay on for HE — I’d suggest that this is where the problem lies — this almost certainly way exceeds the needs of the nation.
Precisely so. Something else for which we can give thanks to Tony Bliar. ‘50% of school leavers must go to University’ a.k.a. ‘as it will reduce the embarrassing levels of youth unemployment’. His legacy will ruin this country.
He recently raised the ante to 70%. Utter madness.
I think I might even accept the £25k pa fees if government refused to fund students who attend any course where less than 50% of the graduates were working professionally in their chosen field 5 years post graduation and earning more than £35k a year (surely that’s not too tough a requirement).
Hard to comprehend how 4th rate most universities are now. As with everything the left destroys all it encounters.
All those Vice Chancellor £400K p.a. salaries need paying somehow.
Since student loans are, in reality, just a disguised graduate tax the effect of this proposal would be to increase the level of public funding for university courses via the write-off of unpaid loans at the end of their 30 year term. At the moment it is expected that just over 50% of student loans will not be paid off. That proportion will rise substantially if fees are increased. Civil servants and ministers will be fools if they fall for this.
If you compare the UK with other countries in Europe and the Anglosphere, UK universities have got themselves stuck in a high cost, fee-paying model. The Vice-Chancellors may compare what they want to charge with elite universities in the US but they neglect the fact that the majority of students at top-ranked US private universities receive a considerable amount of financial assistance. The structure of that assistance causes a lot of angst to middle class parents but still it is there.
Despite some of the comments, UK academic staff are not especially well paid and many of them are on short term contracts. However, there are a lot of them plus large numbers of support staff (relative to the past). In addition, universities have spent very large sums on infrastructure – buildings, recreational and sports facilities, student accommodation, etc – often financed by debt secured against future fee income.
A variant of one of the suggestions would be to impose a cap on total course fees that they cannot exceed, for example, 15 or 20 times the average student loan repayment for students who took the course in the first 5 years after repayments started – adjusted for inflation, etc. So a University could charge more for a course with a high employment rate and high post-training wages than for one with neither. Provide non-loan bursaries for courses that we wish to support such as medicine, nursing or STEM subjects.