Do overseas students welcome higher tuition fees for home students?

Proposals to increase the tuition fee cap to £9000 per year for EU and home students were attacked by over 50,000 students protesting on the streets of London last week. However, the opinions of one particular group of students who also have a stake in this matter have mostly been ignored..

The leading UK universities have a reputation for world-class research and teaching, which attract many overseas applicants. As a consequence, the number of international students in the top universities is a sizeable chunk of the student population, and the money generated by these students is a significant source of funding. At Imperial during the year 2009, fees paid by international students contributed 68.6 million pounds which was over double the income generated by home students’ fees, despite only making up 26% of undergraduate numbers.

If the tuition fee cap is raised, it may reduce the incentive for universities to make up the shortfall in funding by excessively increasing the fees paid by international students or by increasing the numbers . However, while raising the tuition fee cap will plug the gap left by the abolition of the teaching budget, it still leaves many universities underfunded, so international students may yet face a increase in tuition fees. Speaking at Peking University on the 10th of November, Prime Minister David Cameron said that raising the tuition fee cap for home students will mean that “foreign students will still pay a significant amount of money – but we should be able to keep that [international tuition fee] growth under control”.

International students at Imperial currently pay over 7 times the amount that home students pay per annum, though the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) subsidizes some of the teaching costs for home students. International tuition fees are set by the Management Board within College in the previous year. When deciding upon how much international students are charged, a college spokesman stated that “Imperial takes into consideration a number of factors, including the fees set by its national and international competitors, and course demand”.

The average tuition fees faced by international students have steadily risen since 2005 and are set to rise by a further £430 for next year. The most noticeable example of an increase in fees is for undergraduate medicine years 1-3, which has been increased by around a third since 2005. International tuition fees must also be paid upfront and on top of that, bursaries for international students are few and far between.

When asked whether the current disparity between home fees and international fees was fair, the student reaction was mixed, though it was mutually agreed that the issue of international fees is controversial.

One student, who wishes to remain anonymous, believes that he can “see that high fees for foreigners may damage a prestigious university’s ability to take on only the very best students”, but thinks that UK students are more likely to stay in the UK, which could potentially have positive effects on the UK’s economy and skilled workers base. On this basis, he believes “the same benefits will not be seen from foreign students, and so perhaps it is justified that they bear the brunt of university costs” though added that it “sounds to me as if more bursaries should be offered for internationals – this would allow UK universities to acquire outstanding students”.

Another difference for the international fee system is that tuition fees are not frozen for the year of entry, which means that the fees paid by any international students who are currently studying at the university could potentially be affected by changes in the economic climate.

The instability of the international fee system is something that the union finds worrying. The union president, Alex Kendall, believes that “the [international fee] systen needs to be transparent, [international] students need to know how much they pay each year”. The union will be discussing this issue with the College in the coming weeks.

The question of how much top universities can charge before overseas applicants are put off by the fees is a tricky one. An international student, who wishes to remain anonymous, believes that for more well off international students, increasing fees would not deter them from applying to the UK, but added that “for another part of international students, maybe the fees will be too high. Maybe they will choose to go to other European universities, like Germany which has some universities which don’t charge tuition fees at all”. When asked whether a rise in tuition fees would have stopped her from applying to the UK, she answered that it would not have, but that if she was offered a bursary elsewhere, such as the USA, she would have opted to go there instead.

On the other hand, raising tuition fees for home students is also fraught with complications. Imperial student Rebecca Clarke, a 3rd year undergraduate physicist, believes that raising fees for home students would be “more fair for all the non EU students” but she had reservations as to whether raising the tuition fees for home students would be fair overall, “because home students outweigh the numbers of international students, if not at Imperial then certainly across the UK”.

Not raising the tuition fee cap will mean that overseas students may have to shoulder the burden of the shortfall in funding raising their already substantial tuition fees. Raising the tuition fee cap will double or treble the amount of debt that home students leave university with.

Any increase in tuition fees for home students will undoubtedly reduce the financial burden faced by their colleagues from overseas. Nevertheless as the cap on home tuition fees remains, it is likely that the fees paid by international students will continue to play a disproportionate role in plugging the hole in the university’s funding.