VC Supports Higher Tuition Fees
University of Liverpool Vice-Chancellor Sir Howard Newby supports rises in tuition fees that could price out many students from university education.
Whilst in his position as chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Sir Howard claimed that the £3000 a year cap on tuition fees was not enough to create a differential market in higher education and that fees of up to £5000 were needed.
One angry student stated: “The VC seems bent on turning education into a capitalist market that forgets lower-income families not only by cutting departments so locals can't get degrees, but by raising tuition fees.”
The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, have called for a total abolition of tuition fees.
Liberal Democrat Shadow Innovation, Universities and Skills Secretary, Stephen Williams said:
"Bright young people are potentially being put off going to university by the thought of being saddled with £10k in tuition fee debt."
"The Liberal Democrats believe that everyone deserves the chance to develop the skills and knowledge that will give them the best opportunities in life."
"That's why we are committed to scrapping tuition fees for full and part-time students, and improving access to apprenticeships so that everyone can get the best from their education."
NUS campaign, Broke & Broken, also staunchly opposes a raise.
Andrew Shearwood
© 2008-2010. LSMEDIA is written, designed and produced independently by the students of the University of Liverpool.
Comments
Raising tuition fees but wanting to offer few departments, a move that limits choice and could reduce the quality of teaching staff?
Sounds fair to me...
Before the university starts complaining about not having enough money, I think that they ought to stop squandering what funds they do have available on ridiculous things such as that colour changing eyesore on top of the engineering building.
Establishing the university as top flight in Sir Newby's future vision of a 'differential market in higher education' can be achieved from providing a range of excellently delivered and DIVERSE courses. Not through pricing courses out of the every day persons reach.
I like that lighting! Ah it probably wasn't that expensive (ish...), LEDs are cheap as chips and it will look nice from the new University Square bit at night.
to be fair, the engineering buildings plans were in place long before newby, it was part of the £200m campus investment plan. i do believe the lighting scheme was a way of trying to make up for the fact that the university had massively scaled back the planed building works for engineering (essentially building a newer but stumpy version of what was there before). as far as fees go if you want to create a market how about charging for courses according to their costs. is it fair that arts and humanities who use up fewer facilities, resources and staff pay the same rate of fee of much more expensive to run degrees such as engineering, chemistry etc
phil you're such a geek! but yeah, I've sat through LED lecctures too and money-wise, nada, cool? yep!
If courses were charged according to their costs would that not limit the options available to students of low means that happen to want to do something like chemistry or engineering? I think that to a large extent your education is what you make it and universities can only try to make opportunities fair to all financially - someone on a course of fewer facilities/lower resource costs might get far more out of their education than someone in a high resource department through hard work and interest but money should not come in to it.
It doesn't matter about it not costing much - and I'd be very interested to see how much it cost exactly because I would definitely imagine that we are talking in the region of a few thousand - the fact is that it was by no means necessary, it simply serves an aesthetic purpose; and in a day and age where VC's are using highly over stretched budgets as the reason for wanting to increase fees, I think that investing in projects such as this is plain stupid and also highly contradictory.
I also agree with Sophie. If university's start charging their fees according to course, then that is just going to promote inaccessibility in the HE system and that is something we want to avoid.
to be honest that was just how i'd do it IF a market based system was to be used. however top up fees have shown to simply add more burden to the taxpayer than they had when universities were being financed outright. as governments dont actually make money off the loans but have to borrow heavily to fund them. i believe a lib dem funded investigation has shown that they only put in an extra £600m into he instead of the £3bn that was being stated by new lab, whilst still putting strain on the country's finances in the short to medium term. add that to the fact that the university sector has been far too overexpanded needlessly and it's easy to see there is a problem. the focus on forcing everyone into he needs to be scrapped as do the tuition fees
national press have now picked up on the issue of vc's supporting higher fees. but once again we beat them to the story
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