A recent article in The Guardian highlights the potential confusion surrounding tuition fees for certain undergraduate courses. With the government choosing to top-slice 20,000 places from every university’s ‘core’ allocation, offering these places at additional ‘margin’ rates, 27 universities have requested to reduce their average fee below the £7,500 level required to regain some of the extra places they will have lost.

The list of those institutions who have revised their access agreements to bring them within the threshold for bidding for a share of the 20,000 places can be found here.

The upshot of this is that many students have already submitted their UCAS applications before the final decision was made regarding the size of average tuition fees for these universities.

Furthermore, it is more than likely that within a single university fees could range from below £7,500 for some courses up to £9,000 for others. The writer in The Guardian argues that a university is now becoming like a car sales business with ‘sticker prices’ detailing the average fee, so-called ‘£9,000 universities’ putting on courses at discounted rates and institutions averaging £7,500 charging £9,000 for some subjects.

Following the publication of this article in The Guardian, OFFA released the final fee agreements for 2012. These can be found here.

Confused? You will be! Perhaps it would help to have some of this confusion put into perspective. The issue of increased tuition fees stems from the almost complete withdrawal of the annual block grant that the government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching. David Willetts MP, in his address at the British Academy in March 2011, stated that the annual block grant will ‘generally only remain’ for the most expensive-to-teach courses, such as medicine and dentistry, as well as lab-based science courses.

For anybody who remains confused about tuition fees, CH.org will be continuing to provide research into fee structures and will assist readers in comparing the costs of various courses at different universities. Although the situation surrounding tuition fees presents a paradigm shift in UK higher education and, as a result, will no doubt be one of the most important factors of consideration for you, CH.org is also ready and equipped to help students and their parents research other important criteria and make informed decisions relating to a current or future degree in the humanities. Please feel free to get in touch.