Minister rules out lifting cap on student tuition fees

The higher education minister, Robert Halfon, has decisively ruled out lifting the cap on student tuition fees in England, despite increasingly urgent warnings from vice-chancellors about the impact of declining funding on universities, writes Sally Weale for The Guardian.

In an interview with Times Higher Education, the minister said he recognised that some universities were facing challenges, but he said raising student tuition fees in the context of a cost of living crisis was “just not going to happen, not in a million years”.

Halfon’s intervention will come as a blow to vice-chancellors, who say the GBP9,000 (US$11,400) tuition fee, introduced in 2012 and increased to GBP9,250 five years later, is worth little more than GBP6,000 to universities, having been eroded by soaring inflation. The current freeze is in place until at least 2024-25.
Full report on The Guardian site