Image: Jakub Zerdzicki, via Unsplash
Analysis finds fee hike of around £3,000 required to break even, says King’s vice-chancellor
An increase in tuition fees to between £12,000 and £13,000 per year would represent a “fair” settlement for universities in England, the vice-chancellor of King’s College London has said.
Speaking at the Universities UK annual conference, Shitij Kapur said that during work on a forthcoming UUK blueprint, which will set out how universities and the government might reform university financing, an analysis of funding data found that a fee hike of about £3,000 per year was required.
On 5 September, he told delegates at the event, held at the University of Reading, that while calling for such an increase might leave universities looking “out of touch”, it was justifiable.
Kapur said the blueprint team had used Trac data on university income and expenditure to calculate when universities in England could last afford to offer “research-informed teaching” without having to rely on cross-subsidy from international student recruitment.
He said they had concluded that this was in the 2015-16 academic year, and that a return to such a situation today would require annual fees of “between £12,000 and £13,000”, unless there was an increase in direct funding from government.
“If you take that as the anchor in evidence, break-even amount and progress it to today, it [the level] is between £12,000 and £13,000,” he said. “It seemed to us that in a fair world, if we wanted to go back to what was a reasonable time when we could give the British undergraduate a world-class education that was research-informed…that’s the number to ask for.”
However, Kapur acknowledged that requesting such an increase might make universities seem “so out of touch and clueless” that there could be a perception they were about to “lose the plot”.
He said, therefore, that there was an argument that “we should thank our stars” if the sector got a deal that linked current tuition fee levels—which are capped at £9,250—to inflation.
Kapur added: “On the one hand…can we go to £12,500, put that figure out there because that is the right number we will need. But on the other hand, that would seem so clueless—as if you are not looking at the newspapers, you’re not looking at the government’s reality, that you are out of touch.”
The blueprint is due to be published in the next few weeks.
A UUK spokesperson said: “Today our conference discussed the fundamental problem with university finances. 2015-16 was the last year the cost of teaching domestic students–through a mixture of tuition fees and direct government grants, known as the unit of resource–was met. If investment in teaching had kept up with inflation, funding per student would be in the region of £12k-£13k.
“To be clear, we are not calling for tuition fees to rise to this level. In fact, more and more of the burden is falling on graduates, and the UK is increasingly an outlier within the OECD on this. Our new research out today shows the significant benefits to the Treasury generated by graduates, and we believe it is time for a re-balancing of responsibility for funding to recognise that.”
UUK president’s address
Kapur was speaking after UUK president Sally Mapstone told delegates that institutions needed to operate more efficiently if they were to achieve a more robust financial position.
Universities need to “acknowledge that universities cannot, and should not, lay the entirety of the university sector’s funding pressures at [the] government’s door”, said Mapstone, who is principal and vice-chancellor at the University of St Andrews. “We need to continue to operate more efficiently.”
However, Mapstone added that the need for more public investment “is clear” in all four nations of the UK.
“Across the UK, a long-term decline in government funding has increased the pressure on universities to deliver world-class teaching and research with less and less,” she said.
“Welsh universities had their fees capped at a lower level than English institutions until 2024 and, over the last decade, funding per student in Scotland has declined by over £2,500. In Northern Ireland, funding per student has lagged behind England by over £1,000 each year.
“The most recent data shows a £1.7 billion deficit across the UK in teaching alone, with a further £5bn loss in delivering research.”