Formation Continue du Supérieur

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.

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...

By Gervas Huxley. Are tuition fees paid by arts students being used to fund university science? If so it shows a striking lack of accountability, says Gervas Huxley.
In my last blog, I explained that arts and humanities are the only subjects to have benefited from the fee changes introduced by the coalition government, as they have seen an increase in funding per student. But many readers were quick to point out that the connection between the revenue that tuition fees attract and expenditure on tuition is tenuous to say the least. This is true. There is no guarantee that increased revenues from fees, especially for students studying arts, humanities and social sciences, will be spent on their own education. University finances permit multiple kinds of cross-subsidy: both between research and teaching, and between different disciplines. Precisely how the surplus generated by fees is spent will in practice depend on the outcome of a complex process of bargaining between competing parties. Read more...