Imperial has highest international fees

Imperial College has been found to charge the most for their International student tuition fees out of the Russell group universities. The data shows that Imperial’s international students who do clinical medicine are charged a massive £39,150.

International fees are broken down into bands. Band 1 is class-room based subjects and include humanities and social sciences. Band 2 is laboratory based subjects and applies to most of the courses at Imperial, for example Chemistry or Engineering.

Medicine is broken up into pre-clinical and clinical medicine and for some universities there is a difference between the fees. Clinical medicine usually costs a great deal more than pre-clinical medicine and is consistently the highest of the international fees.

For Band 2 subjects, Imperial charges their international students £25,000 which is followed by the University of Cambridge which costs £19,800. The lowest is £10,600 from Queen Mary’s University.

International fees are known to be substantially higher than Home students but this is due to the fact that the government subsidises the fees for Home students.

European Union (EU) students also count as Home students and pay the same fees. Non-EU students count as International students, even if their country is in Europe but not a part of the EU.

An anonymous biomedical student said, “I’d much rather pay less but then taking into account the prestige, the environment and such things, I felt a lot more at home here than compared to Oxbridge. It’s silly, I don’t get why they charge so much to be honest.”

Compared to Oxbridge, the raw fees for Imperial are still higher than both Oxford andCambridge. However, Oxbridge have additional college fees(£6157 for Cambridge and £4500-5500 for Oxford) which means that the overall costs of Oxbridge are higher than Imperial. When the living expenses of London are taken into account, Imperial still comes out on top.

A third year medical student, Minaal Khan said “International fees are ridiculously high as everyone knows, but when applying I don’t think I realisedhow high they really were and I know it will take me over 10 years to make the amount of money I have spent on coming to university! But I don’t regret choosing this field because you can’t put a price on the benefits that are given to me by having this education”.

Another student, who wished to remain anonymous, replied: “There is no doubt that international students should pay more as their places are not subsidized by the government in anyway. However, I do not really see how this comes to £23,500 a year even in comparison to new £9, 000 home fees. In addition, tuition fees keep going up every year by a considerable amount as for me this year ended up being over a £1000 more expensive than the last one. We’ll see what is there to come next year.”

Imperial College London were asked about the fees and the reason for the disparity, and replied with: “When the International Recruitment team visits overseas schools, we are often asked why there is such a difference between Home and Overseas fees. Firstly, it is important to note that UK government still partially funds Home and EU students at universities in England. Although with the new £9000 fees Home and EU students are shouldering more of the financial burden of paying for their teaching than they were previously, they are still not paying the full costs of running the courses.

The reasons behind the disparities between Imperial’s overseas fees and those of our direct competitors are a bit more complex. Although London is a very expensive city, we are aware that London is also home to some of our Russell Group colleagues whose fees differ from ours. The bottom line is that the vast majority of Imperial’s courses are quite expensive to teach given our focus on STEM subjects, whereas other multi-Faculty institutions offer a variety of arts courses which can in effect subsidise the other Faculties. Being at a specialist university has many benefits however including excellent job prospects after graduation. We would hope that students see the value in being part of such an elite technical institution and make the most of their time with us by taking advantage of all the academic and non-academic opportunities Imperial has to offer.”

As has been previously reported in Felix, the job prospects for Imperial graduates are very high compared to competing universities.