The Tuition Fees Dilemma

In the very near future, the government will review the current limits on tuition fees. They’ll have three main options: keep the current cap at just over £3,000; increase tuition fees to something like £5,000 a year; or abolish them altogether. With the national debt growing, ministers are in a sticky situation and have a tricky problem on their hands.

‘Top-up fees’ were first introduced in 2004 to deal with a funding crisis in higher education. Universities were demanding more money and they still are today. Universities claim they are struggling to find the cash to continue offering the range of courses and the number of places they want to. They’re even struggling to pay their staff. University lecturers recently went on strike in a dispute over pay.

But the problem is resurfacing once more. The president of Universities UK recently said “Universities will require further injections of resources, from whatever source, if they are to continue to provide the high quality student experience for which we are internationally renowned”. But with the taxpayer running out of money, there is only one source from which this money must come and that is tuition fees.

The introduction of tuition fees in 2004 prompted concerns that people would be put off by the cost of university and applications would fall. On the contrary, university applications hit another record high this summer and look like they’ll continue to go up. Even with fees, more students from low income families go to university in England than do in Scotland, despite the
fact that students no longer pay tuition fees there. So it seems the cost isn’t putting people off.


But there is the problem of debt. If most of us leave Sixth Form and go on to university, we can expect to leave higher education with a debt of around £15,000, and that is a conservative estimate. It is now a harsh reality for many young people in the UK that they must begin their working lives with massive debts to pay off. However, as much as we like to moan about the debt, we do reap the benefits. Nothing is free in life and the same goes for a good job. With a university degree, graduates are far more likely to get high -earning jobs and get bigger salaries. In a way, the debt you incur at university is an investment in your future.

Futures would not be so bright if we did abolish university tuition fees altogether. With university education free, many more young people would see it as a way to avoid working for another three years and we’d see more and more people going to university and getting degrees. Forget the government’s target of 50% of the population going to university; we would quite
easily exceed that. This has major implications for graduates.

Graduate job prospects are already shrinking. Graduates are being forced to apply for jobs in supermarkets because there are no graduate jobs available. And with more and more people earning degrees, the situation will get worse. Degrees will become less valuable and your three years at university will have gone to waste. Employers will start to asking more and more
often for their employees to have postgraduate degrees because they won’t be able to distinguish between those who don’t.

Somebody ultimately has to pay for university education and money doesn’t grow on trees. In an ideal world we’d turn the clock back 30 years to when people did go to university for free but we can’t. Back then, barely 10% of the population went to university; we’re now talking about 30 —40%. Demands for more cash from universities are only going to grow and with the state already £800 billion in debt, the only way for tuition fees to go is up.

This article was published in the December 2009 edition of The Bus Magazine.