By Nick Mann | 5 January 2012
Public spending on higher education in England will fall to its lowest proportion in more than a century once the government’s funding reforms take effect, the University and College Union said today.
Funding for teaching and research at universities in 2014/15 will be £3.7bn – just 15% of the forecast total income for higher education institutions that year, according to UCU analysis.
This would represent a 44% fall from the £6.6bn forecast for the current financial year, which is equivalent to 29.3% of universities’ total income of £22.5bn.
It would also be the lowest proportion of university funding to come from the public purse since 1900/01, when the state provided just 13.4% of higher education support. The highest was in 1960/61, when public funding covered 71.1% of universities’ total income.
The UCU said that as public spending on teaching and research falls, the burden on students to fund higher education will increase.
Under the funding reforms, universities will be able to charge up to £9,000 per student in annual tuition fees for the next academic year. The union forecasts that the proportion of universities’ income coming from students will rise to 47.2% by 2013/14, compared with 35.5% forecast for the current academic year.
UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said the figures showed the shift in the burden of higher education funding from the state to students over the past 30 years – a trend that would be accelerated by the government’s ‘regressive’ university reforms.
‘These plans will put at risk decades of progress in opening up access to education and will endanger the health of the sector. You cannot maintain a world-class university system in the twenty-first century by turning the clock back to the 1900s and before.
‘Our universities are a public good that currently generate billions for economy. Why put that at risk by starving institutions of public funds and forcing students to foot the bill?’
In response to the UCU analysis, a spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said that the government expected total funding for universities to have increased by 10% between 2011 and 2015.
‘Our reforms put university finances on to a long-term sustainable basis. Students will have more study choices and funding for universities will follow their decisions,’ he said.
‘We estimate that total funding for the sector could increase by around 10% over the Spending Review period.’
