Forget tuition fees – students can't afford to live

By David Ellis. Financial pressures are putting students off applying – but it's the day-to-day cost, not the much-bemoaned £9000 tuition fees, that is most prohibitive.
There is no connection between the Mayan apocalypse forecast and my piece predicting the late rise in university applications, except that they came about within a couple of days of each other and were both subject to the same querulous scepticism. While the Maya proved to be mistaken, I’m relieved that I was not – and not just because I prefer being right.

Admissions tutors spent their time trawling through almost 19,000 more submissions this year over last, a swell of 3.5 per cent. Assuredly encouraging, though not an opportunity for our Government to gloat – and certainly not sufficient cause for universities minister David Willetts proclamation that “there are no financial barriers to higher education”.

This is clearly not true. The rise can perhaps be taken as indication sixth-formers have rightly realised tuition fees needn’t be an obstacle to education and student loan repayments are, in practice, a manageable graduate tax. But applications are still down 4.8 per cent on 2010, when increased fees made their unwelcome introduction. For applications to go up, something needs to change. Read more...