Matt N
TS Member
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Hi guys. Since Blair’s Labour government introduced tuition fees in 1998, UK students have had to pay to attend university. Fees hit their current height of £9,250 per year in 2012 under Cameron’s Conservative-LibDem coalition government, which proved a controversial move given that the Liberal Democrats had campaigned on a platform of abolishing tuition fees during the 2010 election. Since their introduction, tuition fees have proved to be a contentious topic, with some parties, such as the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, campaigning for them to be abolished and for all current student debt to be written off. So my question to you today is; do you think that university tuition fees should be abolished? Or do you think that they should stay?
Personally, as a student currently within the university system, I’m actually somewhat undecided. A few years ago, I was an unwavering advocate for the abolition of tuition fees. I even wrote a very impassioned speech about the topic for a persuasive writing exercise in Year 9 English! However, I’ve grown increasingly undecided after having read a little more into the topic, as there are some very valid arguments for both sides of the coin, in my view. Let me set out what I feel are the most valid arguments for both sides of the coin…
Arguments in favour of tuition fee abolition
But what do you think?
Personally, as a student currently within the university system, I’m actually somewhat undecided. A few years ago, I was an unwavering advocate for the abolition of tuition fees. I even wrote a very impassioned speech about the topic for a persuasive writing exercise in Year 9 English! However, I’ve grown increasingly undecided after having read a little more into the topic, as there are some very valid arguments for both sides of the coin, in my view. Let me set out what I feel are the most valid arguments for both sides of the coin…
Arguments in favour of tuition fee abolition
- Other countries have no university tuition fees - Many other developed countries manage to pull off free university education, so why couldn’t the UK? Germany manages it with a higher number of university students than the UK currently has, so it could certainly work in the UK.
- It would lower students’ debt burden following university - The current tuition fees and maintenance loans give English students, on average, around £45,150 in debt upon leaving university (https://www.statista.com/statistics/376423/uk-student-loan-debt/). I think few would deny that this is a lot of money to think about paying back, so abolition of these fees would lower the debt burden upon newly employed graduates.
- It could lower pressure on university students to succeed and by extension improve students’ mental health - Having a fee of £9,000 per year attached to a degree course arguably puts a high amount of pressure upon students to succeed and is detrimental to their mental health. This is because if students get anything less than the very top grades, they may feel the pressure of having “wasted” their money, which is surely a very big mental burden to shoulder.
- It could allow, or at least encourage, greater access to higher education - People worried about the £9,000 fees could currently be put off higher education due to fears of them being unable to pay the fees off. If the fees were abolished, this particular obstacle would disappear.
- Abolition of tuition fees could cost a lot of money and potentially be unsustainable - It’s estimated that tuition fee abolition would cost the public purse £11bn, which goes up to £60bn if you wipe out all current student debt. This would have to be paid for through either higher taxes or higher borrowing, and given that that sum will likely increase as student numbers grow, this could possibly prove unsustainable in the long term without either a substantial increase in taxes or a substantial reduction in the quality of higher education provided.
- Tuition fees are not deterring people from going to university, on average, including poorer students - There were 2.66 million students studying at UK universities in 2020-21, which is the highest ever (https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/la...ening participation,compared to 14.1% in 2012.). The percentage of UK 18-year-olds from low participation neighbourhoods is also 9.9% higher than it was in 2012 (24% in 2021 compared to 14.1% in 2012), and the entry rate of state school students on free school meals at age 15 has increased by 7.9% (20.9% in 2021 compared to 13% in 2012), so even poorer students aren’t being deterred by the fees.
- Tuition-free universities would have to introduce a cap on student numbers, which could prove counterintuitive to growing university participation and disproportionately discriminate against poorer students - The abolition of fees would probably lead to the reintroduction of a cap on student numbers, which would prohibit the growth of numbers in higher education and could disproportionately discriminate against those from lower income families (due to them not typically having as much access to things like extracurriculars that could further a CV as someone from a higher income background). It would also stop a number of people who want to access university from accessing it, which is surely counterintuitive to one of the big perceived gains of abolishing fees in the first place. Scotland abolished fees in 2007, and their student numbers have stayed flat compared to England’s.
- Free universities could lower the quality of education provided and the amount of provision per student - One of the key reasons for tuition fees being introduced in the first place was because the public purse struggled to pay for adequate provision for students on its own. On average, standards are thought to have raised a fair amount since the introduction of tuition fees.
But what do you think?
