The urgent need for long-term funding solutions for higher education across the UK has been the topic of much discussion in recent months between providers and policymakers and in the press.
It is a matter which has achieved particular prominence in England, where a number of institutions have announced significant savings plans and anxious voices have been raised in some quarters about the long-term sustainability of the sector at its current size.
Today’s £9,250 domestic student tuition fee is in real terms worth less than three-quarters of the value of the £9,000 fee when it was introduced in 2012. As a result, English universities last academic year subsidised the costs of educating domestic undergraduates to the tune of an average of £2,500 per student.
This situation has grown so serious that Universities UK has gone so far as to call upon the next government to implement a rise in tuition fees that takes into account the effects of inflation, but this policy does not appear to have widespread public support.
