Government Raises Tuition Fees as UK Universities Struggle
Lilac Carr, BA Politics and International Relations
Following the UK Government's Department for Education’s, or DfE’s, initial announcement in November 2024, maximum tuition fees for university students have risen for the 2025-2026 academic year from £9,250 to £9,535. Maintenance loans will also be increasing by £414 this year in tandem with tuition fee rises.
This rise is relatively small compared to the controversial ones of 2004 under Blair and of 2010 under Cameron’s coalition government, which saw fees raised from £1,000 to £3,000 and from £3,290 to £9,000, respectively. However, this marks the first time the government has raised tuition fees since 2017.
Furthermore, these rises have been determined according to inflation rates. This parallels the previous rise in tuition fees in 2017 under Theresa May, in which fees rose from £9,000 to £9,250 in line with that year’s inflation rates.
The 2017 increase was initially intended to be the first in a series of annual increases. However, successive governments have frozen the tuition fee cap. If this rise marks a decision by the UK government to increase tuition fees in line with inflation annually, which appears likely, they would be set to exceed £10,000 by 2030, according to a report by the Financial Times.
This decision by the government comes as a response to an increasingly dire financial situation for UK universities. Both universities and students have faced hits to resources and budgets in real terms, due to inflation, which the rises in tuition fees and maintenance loans seek to cancel out for this year. Furthermore, restrictions placed on international students under Sunak and Starmer, as well as Brexit - which also resulted in the loss of EU teaching grants - have significantly restricted the budgets of UK universities.
In recent years, UK universities have responded to this with the closure of modules, courses and entire departments, paired with reducing investments and repairs spending. In the most extreme cases so far, the Universities of Kent and Greenwich have announced a merger, set to become a ‘super-university’ with over 47,000 students. The University of College Union and its secretary, Jo Grady, described this as a takeover of Kent amidst severe financial difficulties, which would inevitably result in layoffs.
Despite the recent rise in tuition fees, these trends are set to continue in the coming years. One notable exception is the wages of university vice-chancellors, which have increased by over £40,000 to an average of £340,000 in the last three years amidst stagnant wages and mass layoffs across the rest of the sector.
Tuition loans in the UK are among the highest in Europe. Having introduced the system, Tony Blair justified this as a fair funding measure which would ensure wider access to higher education. However, some argue that rising tuition fees have seen higher education become increasingly inaccessible and marketised, with UK universities becoming excessively dependent on and subject to the influence of democratically unaccountable private funding.
