Should students or public pay for English tuition fees deficit?

If one policy epitomises the dying days of the UK’s last Conservative government, it has to be Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that the country bring back mandatory national service.

It was an idea not welcomed by even the army, which feared an influx of unwilling amateur recruits, yet still, in a pre-election Public First poll on education priorities, the “desperate” plan gained more support than raising university tuition fees.

Having to pay more for something is unsurprisingly never a popular option, but England’s antipathy to higher fees is deep-rooted and visceral, entwined with an unease about marketisation and complex feelings towards universities in general.

Perhaps not wanting to court further unpopularity, university leaders have been somewhat standoffish in their calls for more funding thus far, making the case about dwindling resources but not saying explicitly what students – or the government – should pay.

At the recent Universities UK (UUK) conference, the vice-chancellor of King’s College London, Shitij Kapur, suggested that they could be more bullish in their demands, a stance that notably gained the backing of most of the room in a straw poll.

He also put a figure on it: £12,000 to £13,000 per student was the amount needed to get universities back to break-even levels last seen in 2015-16, according to Professor Kapur.

While this figure merely reflects what the level of fee would be if it had been linked to inflation at the start, the comment was inevitably interpreted as a demand for fees of this level now, which Professor Kapur himself said would appear “clueless”, and few believe it is realistic.

Speaking to Times Higher Education, the King’s leader said he was “certainly not” calling for £12,500 fees. “I think the amount English undergraduates pay in fees is fair. And it would be fair to ask that they continue to pay this amount adjusted for inflation going forward,” he said.

David Green, the longstanding vice-chancellor of the University of Worcester, said “given the toxic record of increasing student fees”, advocating that they rise again “seems a highly unwise course of action”.

As one of the few serving vice-chancellors who was around at the time of the last major funding changes in 2012, when fees were trebled and government grants to universities largely disappeared, he felt that “putting all the emphasis on increasing home tuition fees is wrong and, just as in 2012, will end in tears for many students, particularly mature students, as well as for many institutions”.

Rather than a big ask on fees, key figures in the sector appear to be coalescing around a position that pushes for a big ask on public subsidy, with the government, not the graduate, making up the 30 per cent shortfall.

Indexing fees to inflation – which would take them up initially to around £9,600 but crucially add a mechanism that would see them increase incrementally – and a call for more public funding, is likely to be the key demand in the forthcoming UUK “blueprint” that has been a year in the making and for which Professor Kapur acted as a commissioner.

He said the UK had become an outlier in the level of public finance for higher education, citing Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development data that shows “we have now become the most privately funded public university education system in the world…we have to find a better balance than the one we have between private and public contributions to university resources”.

Vivienne Stern, the chief executive of UUK, said solving the funding situation at times felt like an “impenetrable puzzle box”, but a solution needed to “start with the principle that higher education is a public as well as a private benefit”.

“We do need action on the domestic tuition fee to stop it being eroded by inflation, but we also need to rebalance the investment by the public alongside that of an individual,” Ms Stern added.

She said there needed to be a system of “shared responsibility” re-established because the “unfortunate language of fees and loans has really shaped the way people think about how graduates contribute towards the cost of their education”.

Ms Stern said she was “optimistic” that universities could make this case to the government, as there was recognition that the UK “needs a university system that is firing all cylinders to be an engine for economic growth and allowing it to be hollowed out would be a colossal mistake”.

“We’re not going to lay the whole of this problem at government’s door,” she added. “We’ve spent a year working in really quite thorough detail through what universities themselves can do to be more efficient, to reduce their costs, to transform the way they operate, and one of the things we will say pretty clearly is we are going to do more to assist the sector to streamline and reform. That has to be part of the mix.”

A fee increase was unlikely to help those institutions in immediate financial peril as much as others, nor “guarantee that it will improve the student experience or outcomes in the short to medium term either”, said Andy Westwood, professor of government practice at the University of Manchester and a former adviser to Labour universities ministers.

He felt there was a need for the government to figure out what it wants from the sector and to then ask itself: “Do we think this is the best system for funding HE in the medium to longer term?”

“If the answer is ‘no’, then trying to solve funding issues via [increasing fees] in the short term isn’t necessarily a good idea as it reinforces the current system, its incentives and competition as a whole,” Professor Westwood said.

Labour’s stated national missions – particularly the need for economic growth via active industrial and regional strategies – meant that it was not “obvious that continuing market competition and the funding and regulation that supports it is the best or optimal approach”, Professor Westwood said.

More direct funding might allow the government a greater role in planning and linking outcomes to its goals, which, to ministers, “might be more preferable”, he added.

“So, the sector might be better advised to look at this reconfiguration of incentives and objectives at the same time as it asks for more funding – and explaining how spending on the latter could better support government objectives.”

With the weeks before the 30 October budget seen as crucial for influencing public policy, Diana Beech, the chief executive of London Higher, which represents universities in the capital, said the sector should be aware that to be successful, it “requires tactics and trust”.

“Being bold about the sector’s potential to serve the nation in myriad ways does not mean that we should be brazen about our own asks before we have earned the trust of our new policymakers and understood what may be expected in return,” she said.

“The best way to increase the political will to look out for the long-term health of our sector, especially at a time of fiscal constraint, is by proving universities can be effective partners as the government delivers on its missions, and successfully showing their added value to society.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com