A survey of England’s university vice-chancellors has revealed that undergraduate tuition fees must rise to £6,000 or more if teaching costs are to be met.

Fees are currently fixed at £3,000 per year but an independent review will be held in 2009 and a study by the Guardian suggests that it will find a considerable funding gap. Expensive science courses and law and medicine degrees at Oxford and Cambridge could command annual fees approaching £10,000 when the current charges are re-assessed in 2010.

The old flat rate tuition fee of £1,100 raised £800 million annually towards the cost of funding students’ degrees. It is expected that last year’s rise will see this figure increase to £1.35 billion, but that this will still be inadequate. Per capita spending on students continues to trail the United States, where universities receive £11,500 per year to teach each undergraduate.

In England the figure is £7,300. The student loans system seems unsustainable. Since 1991 the government have lent UK students £22 billion, of which they have recouped only £5 billion.

The survey included member institutions of the prestigious Russell group, but the University of Cambridge declined to participate to avoid “pre-judging” the review. Speaking on behalf of Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard, Matthew Moss told Varsity that “undergraduate education at Cambridge remains under-funded”, but insisted that “the University has not been lobbying for a further rise in undergraduate fees”. One of Richard’s main initiatives during her term at Cambridge has been a major fundraising drive to raise one billion pounds for core expenditure at the university. CUSU President Mark Ferguson urged the University to “come out against higher fees, as it can be a major player in the debate”.

Undergraduate education at Cambridge remains under-funded

Moss emphasised the University’s unusual position as committed to “key strengths”, such as individual tuition, small-group supervisions and the collegiate system, which are “by their nature expensive to maintain”. But he remains confident that the “generous bursaries” on offer mean that “no prospective UK student should be deterred from applying to Cambridge for financial reasons”.

It seems that if Cambridge’s position as an internationally renowned university is to be sustained, the university will have to improve its fundraising efforts. Harvard receives annual donations of £310 million. Together Oxford and Cambridge raised £185 million in 2004-05.

National admissions fell by 3.6 per cent in 2006 on the introduction of top-up fees, but have nevertheless increased by 13,000 since 2004. It is unclear whether last year’s decline was caused by the greater cost of attending university, or if students intending to take a gap year in 2005 chose not to defer their entry in order to avoid paying fees.

History fellow Professor Gillian Evans warned against fee increases as “a dangerous road to travel down”, suggesting that “many Oxbridge academics who came from working class backgrounds like me would not have got so far in the present system” if a similar scheme had been in place. Her concerns were shared by MML professor Philip Ford who called higher charges “inevitable” but stressed that “this should only happen if colleges can provide sufficient bursaries so that coming to Cambridge is truly based on talent and ability, and not on wealth”. He insisted that “as it is the UK economy that benefits from a well educated population… I would strongly favour the Scottish approach [of full government funding]”.

Mark Ferguson summarised the quandary of higher education financing. “The system as it currently exists is, of course, unsustainable – but so are continued fee hikes.”

Elliot Ross