Before the early 2000s, Britain’s universities were almost wholly funded by taxpayers, but the amount halved between 1975 and 2000.
Then a Labour government introduced tuition fees, at first of up to £1,000 a year, shifting costs from the state to graduates, later raising them to £3,000.
The 2010 coalition government hiked fees again – capped at £9,000 a year. The following Conservative government raised the cap in line with inflation and scrapped maintenance grants.
Tuition fees in England can now be as much as £9,250 a year, leading to punitive levels of debt, averaging £44,940 last year.
Unpaid student loan debt is now one of the main elements of public spending on higher education. The fifth version of the student loan scheme was introduced last year. It has boosted the amount students will pay for their education – by more than 50 per cent on average.
Two-fifths of our universities are about to run budget deficits and a third have financial difficulties, leading to redundancies, closures of departments and courses, and a looming wave of mergers and acquisitions.
Universities have tried to balance the books by recruiting overseas students – 600,000 of them in 2021-22 – who pay up to £38,000 a year in fees. This income stream relies on decisions by foreign governments.
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