Tuition fees in England go up this year for the first time in eight years and the response from universities has ranged from tepid to dismayed. It’s not hard to see why: Russell Group analysis found that the new amount of £9,535 a year – an increase of £285 – is a real-terms decrease of 26% since 2017.
The value of the fees has been steadily eroding since 2012, and the original figure of a maximum of £9,000 a year was artificially low for many courses anyway. Universities started off cross-subsidising expensive courses whose costs weren’t met by nine grand a student with the cheaper, classroom-based ones, mainly humanities, which were running a surplus. Within a decade, those courses – such as history, law, English – were running at or near cost.
As the value of the fees deteriorated in real terms, staff pay and conditions were sacrificed to keep things afloat; by 2021, the University and College Union (UCU) found that staff pay had decreased by one-fifth since 2009. Throughout, the sometimes astronomical fees paid by foreign students underpinned what was otherwise an unaffordable model. This introduced a lot of risk into the system – from our own governments, when they have gone to war against student visas, and from world events: student numbers were hit when the Nigerian currency started struggling, an event over which UK universities had no control.
Put simply, we have a really strange system in higher education, where nobody admits how much things actually cost, nobody admits who’s paying for what, research is kept alive on the toil and goodwill of underpaid academics, foreign students who represent a huge export market and an incredible success story for the sector are treated as if they are somehow on the fiddle, and that’s before you even start to consider the matter we generally look at first: what this means for graduate debt.
The student loan scheme is now on its eighth iteration since it was devised by the coalition government. Originally, it was designed to be generous, to mollify the Conservatives’ Liberal Democrat partners. Steadily, the maximum term from graduation has gone up (it’s now 40 years in England before your debt is wiped, no longer 30) and the earnings threshold at which you start paying has gone down (it’s now £25,000). Even those changes don’t protect the government from the students who will never earn enough to repay – two years after the loans were formalised, parliament estimated that 40% would never fully repay. By 2018, that figure had gone up to 83% (though analysts stressed that they might repay some, but not all).
You could argue that all this is the inevitable result of charging tuition fees at all, given that students in the US also labour under an astronomical amount of debt, which totalled $1.7tn at the start of this year. But the conditions we have created are murkier – unwilling to accept or discuss the impact student fees would have on equality of opportunity, we chose instead to insist that all universities offered degrees of the same financial value, and all courses cost the same, and delivered the same career benefits. This has thrown up some ridiculous consequences, in which the research that gives a university its standing has become increasingly unaffordable for all but the most prestigious institutions.
Unable, meanwhile, to face the political consequences of a fees hike, successive governments have clung instead to the absurd proposition that education is somehow immune to inflation.
But “student fees aren’t the problem”, Martin Lewis said this week on his podcast – an astonishing remark, given the problems they are mired in, yet also true, from the perspective of the household. Whichever way you slice it, paying back fees is tomorrow’s problem for the student; living costs, by contrast, are today’s problem for the family. There’s a separate loan available, but it’s means-tested based on family income and under-25s start to lose eligibility at a household income of only £25,000. To imagine such a household having the savings available to make up any gap is just fanciful; which fits the overall picture of a system running on avoidance and delusion.
A graduate tax is sometimes floated as a more progressive alternative, based as it would be on what used to be understood as a foundational principle of public policy: that wealthier people can afford to contribute more. This, along with the idea of education as a public good, which we all benefit from even if we didn’t personally undertake it, has vanished from debate; yet nothing systematic or in any way realistic has replaced it.
The idea of abandoning the fees experiment altogether, meanwhile, is the stuff dreams are made of because it would be unthinkably expensive. Yet the status quo we have arrived at could hardly be called cheap, unless your idea of thrift is to break a system that’s been centuries in the making.