University Challenged - The Pandemic, Fees and Students

The government subsidizes STEM programs directly to a modest extent, but there are no direct subsidies in other disciplines, so costs are nominally covered by the students. However, because repayment only takes place when the income threshold is reached, and debts are retired after 20 years, it is expected that a little more than half of all tuition costs will be finally paid by the former students. The level of continuing government funding is sizeable, and with public debt mounting by £8-10 billion per annum, due to tuition loans alone, and with the total level of public borrowing having increased massively during the pandemic period, Treasury is now looking for ways to reduce the burden. In a user-pays system, the pressure from the economic departments of government to transfer more of the cost onto the user does not go away - something worth keeping in mind in France.

The government has two solutions in mind. One is to reduce the level of the standard tuition fee. Two years ago, the Augar committee on post-secondary financing recommended a cut in the fee to £7500, pointing to significant numbers of graduates whose starting salaries are relatively low. Courses in the arts, humanities and social sciences in some institutions have been stigmatized as "low value courses". At the time of writing, an early announcement on fees was being anticipated with dread by universities. This would create severe downward pressures on quality, especially in lower tier universities, and push the sector into increasing its dependence on foreign student fees, despite the risks entailed.

The government’s other solution is to propel part of the higher education enrolment towards cheaper sub-degree Further Education colleges. The government has already announced that it will facilitate such a movement by introducing a four-year lifelong learning entitlement on the income contingent loan basis. This has redoubled the Treasury’s motivation to secure a cut in higher education fees, so as to contain the total public costs of income contingent loans. The government’s growing disenchantment with the expansion of university education is showing also in its loss of enthusiasm for building the participation of first-in-family students through modified admissions criteria and foundation year provision. It wants prospective students from poorer parts of the country, under-represented in higher education, to shift their aspirations from higher education to "less prestigious" courses. 

While demand is more robust in the upper tiers of the UK’s highly stratified system, and administrative costs in domains such as communications and recruitment have increased, at this point of time no university in the market system has gone under. 

With the government refusing to provide financial guarantees in the UK’s market-based system, institutions have worked hard at retooling both pedagogy and administration. Amid a spike in staff workloads, online education on the whole appears to have been handled well in the UK. Survey evidence however indicates that at least one student in five lacks adequate access outside the university setting, due to poor Internet receptivity or, often, lack of computing. This period has seen an upsurge in formal and informal student activism. The desire for face to face sociability inside and outside the classroom has been powerful and evident. Many students face significant financial difficulties: the UK’s 2016 abolition of the system of maintenance grants has not served them well. It is good to see Institut Montaigne addressing the issue of student support: there’s a chance that might trigger rethinking in the UK, though the country is often lamentably slow to borrow good ideas from France. 

The government has the main levers under its control - total funding, fee levels and student support funding - but has been happy to sit back and let universities and students slug it out. Universities positioned as quasi-corporations and treating their students as customers can generate bad faith. Concerned about protecting enrolments in the market, many universities oversold the potential for a "near normal" experience at the beginning of the 2020-21 academic year. Students unable to access classes have organized to demand fee remission or rent remission. Some rent relief has been granted by individual universities. Similar patterns might be unfolding for the 2021-22 academic year. Institutions are optimistic about reopening, and vaccination is rolling out rapidly in the UK but inward travel to the UK has never ceased at any stage of the pandemic, and the virulent Indian variants of Covid-19 are now spreading rapidly. The potential for one more autumn shutdown of the country, and the universities, is real. It is likely that heightened student awareness and organizing, and some bitterness and estrangement, will be ongoing legacies of the pandemic period. 

Copyright: Oli SCARFF / AFP