Students will suffer if the university system in the UK is allowed to “decline in quality” as a result of funding pressures, a vice-chancellor has warned.
British universities would need to recruit more students if undergraduate tuition fees remained frozen, according to a paper by Professor Shitij Kapur, vice-chancellor of King’s College London (KCL).
The leader of the Russell Group university has warned that universities are trapped in a “triangle of sadness” between students burdened with debt, a “stretched government” that allowed tuition fees to fall behind inflation, and “beleaguered university staff” who felt caught in the middle.
The Government raised the cap on university tuition fees in England to £9,000 a year in 2012 and it has been fixed at £9,250 since 2017.
Professor Kapur said the fees were now worth around £6,000 in real terms and inflation had eroded 20% of the resource of universities in the last three years.
In his report, the KCL vice-chancellor said: “Absent any relief, universities will need to keep recruiting more and more international students to be able to afford to teach their domestic counterparts – making the education of UK students hostage to shifting geopolitics and fuelling national concerns about too many immigrants.
