Students will be £9,000 a year guinea pigs under new fees regime

UCU said today that the release of guidance for universities wishing to charge more than £6,000 a year by the access regulator, OFFA, further exposed the 'shambolic state' of the government's fees policy.
 
The union said that as the government had no legal power to set a university's fee level, and UCU research revealed that all institutions would need to charge more than £6,000 just to recoup money axed by the government, it was naive to think that universities would not charge high fees.
 
Even before today's guidance was released every institution that has made its plans known (Exeter, Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial) has stated its intention to charge the maximum £9,000 a year. The union said the guidance's concession that 2012-13 was a 'transitional year' was an understatement and warned that the first intake of students under the new regime would be unfortunate guinea pigs.
 
UCU said the government had so far failed to grasp that, on top of punitive budget cuts, universities are reeling from new restrictions on overseas students and cuts to research funding. The union said it also believed many institutions would opt for the higher fee to ensure they did not lose prestige.
 
The union said that in reality any extra work, however well intentioned, would not be able to overcome the fears of students and their families from poor and average-income backgrounds who will be very wary of getting themselves into thousands of pounds of debt.
 
UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: 'Universities are in a very difficult position as they try to set fees for a new untried system. Students are in a difficult position as they start to consider where they might like to study as how much it will cost them to study won't be clear until the summer.
 
'The millionaires in the cabinet may not think cost will be much of a factor, but that just exposes their ignorance of life in the real world. People, understandably, do not relish the thought of taking on tens of thousands of pounds of debt.
 
'The new system is in a frankly shambolic state highlighted by the call last week from Oxbridge academics to halt the plans until they have been properly scrutinised. We are asking the brightest brains in this country to be guinea pigs for an unfair system that has not been properly thought though. The government must look again at the levels of funding it is taking out of the sector.'

Notes

The full UCU analysis that shows how every single English institution with undergraduates would have to charge more than £6,000 a year just to plug the funding gap created by huge cuts to teaching budgets can be found at: Universities will have to charge £7,000 annual fees just to break even
 
Last week over 600 academics from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge signed a letter warning the government that universities were being forced to 'fly blind' under the new funding regime. The Oxbridge dons said the plans should be halted to allow the changes to be 'coherently and rigorously examined'. More on that can be found here.
 
More on the lack of legal power to impose fee levels can be found here.