Government officials drafted plans that would see tuition fees rise to £10,500 – or 13.5% – over the next five years, a Whitehall source told The Times, and that maintenance grants would be restored for lower income students to shield them from the impact. These plans are still under discussion, not yet approved by the chancellor.
The advocacy group Universities UK, of which Oxford University is a member, had called for increasing home students’ tuition fees this September, citing inflation as a major cause for the need for such a rise. Home student fees have been capped at £9,250 since 2017 and have not kept up with inflation. A 2024 Office for Students (OfS) report suggests that the real-term value of income for teaching students has decreased by approximately 25% since 2015-16.
Multiple students told Cherwell that it’s important to know whether the loan repayment scheme, which was altered in 2022, will change, but that is unclear as of now. The government forecasts that 65% of full-time graduates who started in 2023 will repay their student loan in full, and the average debt for students who started their course in 2022 is currently £45,600. The Institute for Fiscal Studies speculates that if tuition fees were to be raised, over 60% of loanees would not even be able to make higher repayments until their 40s.
An Oxford University student told Cherwell: “A fee increase would be more of a deterrent to working class households.” They added that tuition fee is “essentially a graduate tax” so as long as the loan repayment scheme remains the same, “it doesn’t really matter how much the tuition fee increases, it just means less people will pay it off in full”.
Many institutions rely heavily upon international student fees to cover their operating costs. This comes amid falling numbers of international students coming to the UK for higher education which has exacerbated financial difficulties. The OfS report found 40% of UK universities ran a deficit in the past academic year.
Oxford’s tutorial system makes it one of the most expensive universities to run per student. One tutor has estimated a humanities student costs around £18,000 a year to educate, nearly double the home tuition fee.
Oxford is less reliant on international fees despite international students making up 47% of the total student body. Only 8.1% of the University’s income was from international fees compared to the nationwide average of 24% in 2021-22. Oxford is also less reliant on tuition fees in general, receiving more from research grants, publishing services, donations, and investment income.
Immigration policy and Brexit have been cited as causes for the decline in international students. New student visa rules put in place early this year means that many international students are now unable to bring family with them to the UK. Brexit halved the amount of EU student applicants in 2021, who can no longer pay home student rates or receive funding. This reflects a broader trend where EU students have halved from 2019 to 2023.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said in July that the Labour government had “no plans” to increase university fees, but in a more recent interview she had refused to rule it out. She said she would not “want” to do it, but that the government was “looking at all the options”, and she recognised that the current “value of the fee has eroded”.
Vice President of the National Union of Students, Alex Stanley had previously criticised a similar proposed increase in fees, saying that students should not be made to “foot the bill for the university funding crisis” and that this move would “further punish students who are investing in their future.”
