Given the fury that greeted the government’s decision to triple higher education tuition fees, it took a surprisingly short time for £9,000 a year to be accepted as the going rate for universities.

But Labour’s general election campaign pledge to axe fees completely has dragged the issue back into the spotlight.

The move proved popular among younger voters and appears to have bounced the Conservatives into revisiting the issue, with prime minister Theresa May pledging to undertake a “major review of university funding and student financing” at the party’s conference this month.

For now, at least, the maximum fee has been frozen at £9,250 per year for 2018-19. But while colleges have increasingly been seen as a more affordable source of higher education, new research by Tes has found that a growing number of FE colleges are looking to charge fees on a par with leading universities.

According to data from the Office for Fair Access (Offa), 13 further education colleges will be permitted to charge a maximum fee of £9,250 for 2018-19. A further 13 plan to charge £9,000 per year for at least some of their HE provision. In 2015-16, nine colleges charged £9,000 - the maximum allowed at the time.

Institutions charging more than £6,000 for courses have to establish an access agreement with Offa. The most recent figures show that 85 FE institutions have such an agreement for 2017-18 - an increase from 62 in 2016-17.

‘Negative impact’

The figures also suggest that the average fee charged by FE institutions with such access agreements will rise from £7,313 in 2017-18 to £7,488 in 2018-19.

Last month, a report by the Higher Education Commission suggested that rising HE tuition fees in colleges could have a “negative impact” on disadvantaged students, and could also act as a deterrent to potential part-time and mature students.

Emily Chapman, vice president for FE at the NUS students’ union, says that the increase in colleges charging £9,000+ “shows the desperate need to expand the tuition-fee debate”.

“Learners tend to be older with dependents, have learning difficulties and are likely to be more debt-averse,” she says. “Tuition fees exist outside of universities and act as a barrier to education in a traditional FE setting, too - yet, you wouldn’t know it after the Conservative Party conference.”

New College Durham principal John Widdowson, who chairs the Mixed Economy Group of colleges offering HE, believes that the reason why some colleges charge the maximum price cap for courses is because of the resource-heavy nature of some of the degree subjects that colleges offer.

“We offer more taught hours than most equivalent university degrees - and we offer much closer tutor support and contact and smaller classes,” he says. “So if you do your HE in a college you’re likely to have a class under 20 [students] in most cases, which gives you a lot more contact with your tutor. Obviously, you don’t make economies of scale that way so that probably underpins some of the pricing decisions as well.”

Generating funding

Andy Westwood, professor of government practice at the University of Manchester and a former government special adviser, says that although some fees are “high”, colleges need to generate sufficient funding to pay for a high-quality education. “If you start charging five or six grand, you don’t have much resource to underpin what you’re offering to those students,” he says. “Just as in HE, this is a very logical kind of decision, which maximises the resource that colleges can convert into teaching quality.”

Julian Gravatt, deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges, says: “Fees aren’t paid upfront by higher education students so there are fewer advantages for colleges in charging lower fees‎. The fact that repayments in higher education start after graduation and are income contingent creates an obvious incentive for institutions to increase fees towards the fee cap. It is no surprise that more colleges are setting the higher rate.”

A spokesman for Leeds City College says that the maximum fee will be charged by the specialist Leeds College of Music institution, which is part of the college group.

Tim Jackson, principal of Sparsholt College, says that the costs of delivering foundation, bachelor and Master’s degrees, particularly in the areas of Stem and land-based provision, are “as high for us as they are for universities”.

“The quality of teaching and assessment is reviewed under the same criteria as universities and was reflected in our Teaching Excellence Framework silver award this year,” he adds.

@tesfenews