Fees Could Rocket to £14,000
Written by Anthony Halewood
The official government review into tuition fees is “actively considering” entirely removing the cap on tuition fees, and allowing universities to charge students the full cost of their course, removing government funding from Higher Education entirely.

According to the Sunday Times, Lord Browne and his panel favour removing the cost of tuition fees for all but the most expensive courses, with the cheapest humanities courses starting at around £7,000 a year, with more expensive science degrees running to around £14,000. They are considering keeping some government subsidy involved in the most expensive courses such as medicine, which can cost around £20,000 a year.

Browne is expected not to recommend removing the cap straight away, preferring to raise the cap by £1,000 a year until the cap was no longer needed. It is believed he will recommend some undisclosed form of bursaries to help the poorest students afford the explosion in the cost of university.
With most students now graduating with around £22,000 of debt, he is also expected to recommend that the subsidised interest that students pay should be scrapped, with students paying interest at commercial rates.

Both Labour and the Conservatives have done their best to avoid tuition fees becoming an election issue, with both parties refusing to make any suggestion of what their party’s policy would be until after the review presents its findings, in August, long after the General Election. The Liberal Democrats have said they oppose tuition fees, and have pledged to phase them out over six years, immediately scrapping fees for final year students.

NUS have organised a ‘Vote for Students’ campaign, asking prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) to sign a pledge to “vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative”. Only 15 conservative PPCs signed the pledge, with 219 Labour PPCs and 450 Liberal Democrat PPCs signing up.

Lord Browne is the former head of BP, and went to Cambridge University to study Physics at a time when Higher Education was free for everyone. Lord Mandelson appointed him to the panel with the agreement of the shadow universities secretary David Willets, despite him only ever having made seven speeches in the House of Lords, and only voting once since Lords records began in 2001.