The higher education minister, Robert Halfon, has decisively ruled out lifting the cap on student tuition fees in England, despite increasingly urgent warnings from vice-chancellors about the impact of declining funding on universities.
In an interview with Times Higher Education (THE), the minister said he recognised that some universities were facing challenges, but he said raising student tuition fees in the context of a cost of living crisis was “just not going to happen, not in a million years”.
Halfon’s intervention will come as a blow to vice-chancellors, who say the £9,000 tuition fee, introduced in 2012 and increased to £9,250 five years later, is worth little more than £6,000 to universities, having been eroded by soaring inflation. The current freeze is in place until at least 2024-25.
It will also reignite the debate about the growing recruitment of international students, whose higher fees are used to help plug the funding gap created by the now-devalued domestic tuition fee, amid fears that some domestic students could lose out on places as a result.
A recent investigation by the Guardian revealed that one in every five pounds received by UK universities last year came from international students, prompting concerns about the scale of the sector’s growing dependence on overseas tuition fees for financial survival.
Halfon told the THE: “If you look overall, the vast majority of universities are in good financial health – that doesn’t mean there aren’t some [that are not] and I know OfS [the Office for Students] is investigating some … and I completely get challenges that are being faced.
“But if you look at the research grant, the loans, the money we give – £1.5bn strategic priorities grant plus the £750m on teaching facilities [additional government funding announced last year] – universities get £40bn a year.
