Dressing the Wounds of Government Cuts

It has emerged that while over three-quarters of universities plan to charge the maximum permitted annual fee of ￡9,000, or $15,000, in an attempt to substitute income from student tuition fees for lost government subsidy, some universities may still have trouble remaining financially viable, while others are jettisoning hundreds of courses or even entire academic departments.

David Barrett, assistant director of the Office for Fair Access, the regulator charged with insuring that universities open their doors to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, said that his office did not plan to challenge any university that charged the maximum fees. At the same time a new poll of over 12,000 students in their final year at 24 universities that do plan to charge the maximum shows that 51 percent of them would not have come to university if tuition fees had been at that level.

How are different universities coping with the new financial landscape? And what are universities that do charge the ￡9,000 maximum doing to reassure students from poorer families that higher education is an affordable option?

“Most of our direct government funding will simply disappear,” said Malcolm Gillies, vice chancellor at London Metropolitan University, which has announced the most radical restructuring of any British university. “We have some income from research grants and enterprise activities, but we were still looking at a shortfall of roughly ￡50 million out of an annual turnover of ￡160 million.”

With many students being the first in their families to attend university — 58 percent of students have parents in “manual occupations” — charging the maximum was not seen as a realistic option. The university, which until 1992 was known as the City of London Polytechnic, has instead decided to return to its traditional mission of offering more vocationally focused courses and what Dr. Gillies described as “a more developmental” teaching style to prepare students for well-defined careers.

Last year the university offered 557 courses; in the 2012-13 academic year it will offer only 160, with tuition fees averaging ￡6,850 a year. The history department, which once boasted A.J.P. Taylor on its faculty, will be eliminated entirely, along with philosophy, performing arts and Caribbean studies.

Dr. Gillies, who has degrees in classics and music, said in an interview that he took no pleasure in having to make such deep cuts. But he added that he regarded the restructuring as “a reality test for us.”

“If we don’t rethink what the product is and what value we are offering students we can’t be surprised if people don’t turn up,” Dr. Gillies said. He argued that broad-based study of the humanities “is very hard to do under the British system,” where students traditionally study a single subject at university level. Reducing the number of courses offered would also allow the university to extend the teaching year to 30 weeks, with many courses offered as yearlong modules.

“Our students need the extra learning time,” he said.

At Cambridge, where the teaching year is only 241/2 weeks long, “there are no plans to discontinue any courses,” according to John Beard, the university’s director of undergraduate recruitment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cambridge plans to charge students the full ￡9,000.

“The tuition fee and grant didn’t cover our costs before,” said Mr. Beard, for things like lab-intensive science courses and humanities courses taught mainly in tutorials, or “supervisions” as they are called in Cambridge, with one instructor teaching just one or two students at a time. “Teaching here costs about ￡17,500 a year per student,” he said. “Putting fees up merely allows us to maintain the status quo.”

Cambridge is the leading research university in Britain and has an endowment of nearly ￡1.5 billion, leaving it with no need to seek immediate savings.