Email
Universities minister Greg Clark has ruled out increasing tuition fees and making further cuts to higher education.
Speaking to vice-chancellors at Universities UK’s annual conference in Leeds, Clark said the current £9,000 fee “broadly covers the cost of education for most courses in most institutions and there are arrangements to support high-cost courses.” He said he’s “not persuaded” by the argument for raising fees to take into account increased costs.
UK higher education is in a good place and financially sustainable, he told the conference.
“Higher education in the UK is the envy of the world,” he said, and added that other countries look to what the UK has done with raising fees, and want to copy us, but they aren’t always politically brave enough to do so.
Asked whether the current funding system is sustainable, Clark quoted Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s deputy director for education and skills, who told him earlier this week that the UK was the first European country to establish a sustainable approach to higher education funding.
Schleicher said the public debate underestimates the sustainability by not looking at returns in other ways.
“We take an accounting view of it”, said Clark. “That is the way it is.” But it’s interesting, he said, to note Schleicher’s observations that it has consequences beyond that – and he was clear about the investment pay off for individuals and tax payers.
Christopher Snowden, president of UUK and vice-chancellor of the University of Surrey, disagreed that the sector was financially sustainable, and during the conference, called on the government to provide some stability for universities.
He said: “We need a stable funding regime which is affordable for the country.”
Snowden added that inflation was forcing universities into their cash reserves: “The reality is that universities are now using cash reserves to support things like maintenance, and that is obviously not a sustainable position.
“We need to get back to something that provides stability, and it’s obvious to me that sooner or later you have got to have some sort of indexing model for this because it has got to address the inflation in costs – we are talking about something which can be built into the model.”
Snowden outlined three key areas for an incoming government to address, including: closing the gap between the UK’s investment in research and innovation and that of its major competitors; taking students out of the net migration targets; and developing a sustainable student funding system that is relevant for the whole of the UK.
Clark said he was committed to the widening access agenda and raised the point that postgraduate education was becoming the “new frontier in the battle to widen access”, although he currently has no plans to develop policy in this area.
Clark sidestepped questions about whether he thought students should be exempt from net migration figures, and instead emphasised the importance of there being no cap on the number of international students that universities could recruit. “OECD migration figures conform to the standard definition of what immigration is – you can’t opt in and opt put of it,” he said.
Clark is currently working on a 10-year strategic view of science and innovation, which is due to be published alongside the Autumn statement this year.
More like this:
• Liam Byrne: ‘we need to put higher education at centre stage of policy’
• Labour warns UK will lose global science lead without more investment
• Funding UK higher education: why we shouldn’t copy Australia
Join the higher education network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox. Follow us on Twitter @gdnhighered.
;