Students will have to pay £6000 to £9000 for a degree course starting in 2012. Universities will be allowed to charge £6000 or £9000, depending on the extra support for students. Currently students pay £3.200. Students will be able to get a government funded loan to help them pay for course and living costs. They will have to pay it back when they start earning more than £21.000 a year. This has also increased from £15.000. This will affect students who can’t pay their fees upfront. The interest rate will increase by 3%. Students wanting to repay money early will have to pay 5% more.
The increasing costs of tuition fees will replace the public funding which was withdrawn from universities. It’s said that tuition fees must increase in order to maintain decent teaching standards and institutions.
Critics warned that the increase will hit those from middle – class families and make universities unpopular. Many teenagers will turn their back on university education.
A report by the National Union of students and HSBC shows that 70% of students would put off university if fees would increase to £7000 a year. The higher fees increase the higher percentage of students will not go to university.
Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, said: “In the context of the current recession, it is extremely arrogant for university vice chancellors to be fantasising about charging their students even higher fees and plunging them into over £32,000 of debt”.
Students are applying to universities this year in order to start their course before the introduction of tuition fees.
Figures released by UCAS show that 8000 more students applied to universities. It’s 2.5% more than last year. The competition will be just as fierce as last year because there will be more applications before the deadline.
According to UCAS figures medicine related subjects are popular and number of applications to Linguistics and Classics are decreasing.
No comments:
Post a Comment