Fees to rise to £7,000 after next election
My old school offers places to ex-pupils on their school trips. It’s a simple arrangement: you come along as a responsible adult, and they drag you around the finest Roman ruins in Italy for a week or so, half-board, for a decent price. Realistically you’re there as a spare body, someone who can, if needed, help out in herding a bunch of 14-18 year olds who either have their noses burrowed in their guidebooks or stuck up in amazement at a truly capital Doric, well…capital.
A by-product of spending a week on coaches, in restaurants and around a foreign country with GCSE students is that you get to know them. It gets awkward if you’re four or six years older than the majority of the people around you and simply don’t talk; you have to in order to get by. Which is why I feel sorry for them right now.
Over plates of pasta they told me what they’re studying, and what they want to do with their lives. Some (not many) wanted to be doctors – this was a classics trip, remember. Most were keen on teaching, writing, some sort of liberal arts career. And most of them will begin university, if their lives work out as they’ve planned right now, in September 2011.
Thanks to the freefalling economy and a yearning by both major political parties to get more working-class kids into tertiary education, it looks like they’re going to be taking on even more debt than I am right now – and that’s too much in the eyes of many.
The man who will increase your tuition fees, Peter Mandelson
Lord Mandelson, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, indicated in a speech on Monday to many leading vice-chancellors that universities needed to become more welcoming to vocational degrees as well as the more traditionally academic subjects usually taught – and to open up such places would need an increase in university tuition fees. The current legal limit of £3,225 (the figure every student has ingrained on their mind at this point in the year, filling out forms for loans) would almost definitely be raised by 2013, and theoretically could be done by 2011. The magic figure which most vice-chancellors have settled on as being the new glass ceiling is £7,000 per year.
This would allow whichever political party wins the election early next year to slash spending on higher education while allowing the restructuring and opening up of universities to more working-class school leavers. The fees would plug the money gap quite comfortably.
One of the people I talked to on that trip this past Easter had it all planned out. Breezing through GCSEs and A levels (which looks likely for her) and into Oxford (admittedly more difficult). With the basic fees rising across the board to £7,000 by the time she applies through UCAS to universities – and with the news that “research intensive” institutions (Oxford and Cambridge likely to be the first two names on the list) could potentially charge even more – this looks like a plan which could end up with double the amount of debt being taken on that a university graduate this summer would incur. With fees set at £7,000 a year, think tank Universities UK calculate that the average student would leave university with £32,400 of debt.
The potential high watermark for those elite research institutions could be up to £15,000, experts say, including a £2,000 bursary levy to fund places for those who can’t afford a place in tertiary education.
Paul Wellings, Lancaster University’s vice-chancellor and soon-to-be-chairman of the 1994 Group has spoken of a “valley of death” of students priced out of universities; or worse, students who take the risk of incurring high debts in order to get an increasingly devalued degree.
Would it be worth it, then? Many students of the classes of ’09 are finding it impossible to find a job which the university graduates of 1989 were almost assured of. The opening up of universities to attain New Labour’s aim of getting 50% of school leavers into tertiary education has meant that many degrees from all but the best universities are worth less than they used to be. No longer are university degrees an all-access pass to the job ladder; nor are they necessarily value for money anymore.
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