In an e-mail to staff in September 2024, Christopher Day, the vice-chancellor of Newcastle University in the UK, announced a £35m shortfall in its finances for 2024. Unfortunately, Newcastle is not alone in facing financial difficulties. The problem is largely due to UK universities obtaining much of their funding by charging international students exorbitant tuition fees of tens of thousands of pounds per year. In 2022 international students made up 26% of the total student population. But with the number of international students coming to the UK recently falling and tuition fees for domestic students having increased by less than 6% over the last decade, the income from students is no longer enough to keep our universities afloat.

Both Day and Universities UK (UUK) – the advocacy organization for universities in the UK – pushed for the UK government to allow universities to increase fees for both international and domestic students. They suggested raising the cap on tuition fees for UK students to £13,000 per year, much more than the new cap that was set earlier this month at £9535. Increasing tuition fees further, however, would be a disaster for our education system.

The introduction of student fees was sold to universities in the late 1990s as a way to get more money, and sold to the wider public as a way to allow “market fairness” to improve the quality of education given by universities. In truth, it was never about either of these things.

Tuition fees were about making sure that the UK government would not have to worry about universities pressuring them to increase funding. Universities instead would have to rationalize higher fees with the students themselves. But it is far easier to argue that “we need more money from you, the government, to continue the social good we do” than it is to say “we need more money from you, the students, to keep giving you the same piece of paper”.

Degree-level education in the UK is now treated as a private commodity, to be sold by universities and bought by students, with domestic students taking out a loan from the government that they pay back once they earn above a certain threshold. But this implies that it is only students who profit from the education and that the only benefit for them of a degree is a high-paid job.

Education ends up reduced to an initial financial outlay for a potential future financial gain, with employers looking for job applicants with a degree regardless of what it is in. We might as well just sell students pieces of paper boasting about how much money they have “invested” in themselves.

Yet going to university brings so much more to students than just a boost to their future earnings. Just look, for example, at the high student satisfaction for arts and humanities degrees compared to business or engineering degrees. University education also brings huge social, cultural and economic benefits to the wider community at a local, regional and national level.

UUK estimates that for every £1 of public money invested in the higher-education sector across the UK, £14 is put back into the economy – totalling £265bn per year. Few other areas of government spending give such large economic returns for the UK. No wonder, then, that other countries continue to fund their universities centrally through taxes rather than fees. (Countries such as Germany that do levy fees charge only a nominal amount, as the UK once did.)

Some might say that the public should not pay for students to go to university. But that argument doesn’t stack up. We all pay for roads, schools and hospitals from general taxation whether we use those services or not, so the same should apply for university education. Students from Scotland who study in the country have their fees paid by the state, for example.

Up in arms

Thankfully, some subsidy still remains in the system, mainly for technical degrees such as the sciences and medicine. These courses on average cost more to run than humanities and social sciences courses due to the cost of practical work and equipment. However, as budgets tighten, even this is being threatened.

In 2004 Newcastle closed its physics degree programme due to its costs. While the university soon reversed the mistake, it lives long in the memories of those who today still talk about the incalculable damage this and similar cuts did to UK physics. Indeed, I worry whether this renewed focus on profitability, which over the last few years has led to many humanities programmes and departments closing at UK universities, could again lead to closures in the sciences. Without additional funding, it seems inevitable.

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University leaders should have been up in arms when student fees were introduced in the early 2000s. Instead, most went along with them, and are now reaping what they sowed. University vice-chancellors shouldn’t be asking the government to allow universities to charge ever higher fees – they should be telling the government that we need more money to keep doing the good we do for this country. They should not view universities as private businesses and instead lobby the government to reinstate a no-fee system and to support universities again as being social institutions.

If this doesn’t happen, then the UK academic system will fall. Even if we do manage to somehow cut costs in the short term by around £35m per university, it will only prolong the inevitable. I hope vice chancellors and the UK government wake up to this fact before it is too late.