Aston and Grosseteste suggest average tuition fees will reach £8,300

Update 19 April: The latest version of the forecasts can be found here.

In the past two days, four additional universities have declared their tuition fee levels – Manchester, Warwick, Aston and Bishop Grosseteste. The effect of the new data on Research Fortnight’s model of fees for the whole of England is significant. Because of the announcements made by Aston and Bishop Grosseteste, the average level of fees we are forecasting rises by £300 to £8,300 a year.

Aston’s decision to charge £9,000 significantly extends the range of universities likely to charge the maximum. This group now accounts for nearly half of all universities – making £9,000 far from the “exceptional” occurrance that Vince Cable promised MPs in the crunch Commons debate on fees.

At the same time, the Bishop Grosseteste jump to £7,500 suggests that, on the whole, fees at the bottom of our table will be higher than suggested presviously by the single London Metropolitan decision. The Lincoln college is so close to the bottom of the rankings that it suggests almost no institutions will go below £7,000.

By contrast, the Warwick and Manchester announcements simply confirm the picture we had before at the top of the table.

The new average of £8,300 does not take account of the effect of any tuition fee waivers. Its hard to know how big an effect these will have. At Oxford and Cambridge I gather they expect this to depress the average level of fees by about £500, or about 6 per cent. If we assume that other places will lack the funds to be so generous, then we can guesstimate that waivers will depress average fees by around 4 per cent. In this case, the actual level of fees charged drops to about £8000 on average across the whole of England.

So here is the second iteration of our forecast of fees for the whole of England, based now on 11 announcements. Remember – this is a crude exercise and there remain too many caveats to mention. For a general description of the method used, see our original forecast. Note: Birmingham and Lancaster now added at £9k – but they dont change the forecasts.