Oxford University Chancellor Lord Patten is calling for tuition fees to be uncapped. Photo credit: Oxford University.

Oxford University Chancellor Lord Patten of Barnes has announced in a speech that university tuition fees should be uncapped to help meet the cost of teaching students and help to maintain the world-class status of universities such as Oxford.

The former governor of Hong Kong said it was “preposterous” that institutions could only charge undergraduates a maximum of £3,225 a year – less than half of what teaching professors could pay for their own childcare.

The speech was made yesterday (16 March) at the Independent Schools’ Council (ISC) annual conference in London, and he emphasised that he was expressing his own views.

He said: “Speaking entirely for myself not, I emphasise, in any representational role, I do not think that at our greatest universities we should give up Government support for our teaching.

“We do after all meet a common good which deserves financial assistance.

“For myself, I repeat, I would however be prepared to cap the present funding of our teaching grant if we were able as a result to set whatever tuition fee we wanted provided that we could demonstrate that we were still guaranteeing needs-blind access with generous bursaries.”

Lord Patten, a Conservative education minister during the 1980s and then Governor of Hong Kong, said later that it cost just over £16,000 to teach an undergraduate at Oxford, about half of which was covered by publicly funded teaching grants and tuition fees.

And with these places becoming ever scarcer, there is an element to this reasoning that makes sense – made further convincing by the increased education spending cuts this year by the government of £1 billion.

Last year, some 584,000 applications were received from students in the UK and EU and 449,000 gained a university place, it was revealed. This meant some 135,000 either dropped out of the applications process or failed to get in.

This year, applications are up 23%, while the number of university places available has been cut by 6,000, according to an analysis by the Conservatives.

The party said that if the current application trends continued until the summer, as many as 275,000 students would be denied a place – more than twice as many as last year.

Lord Patten stressed also that some universities should focus on specialist areas, he said, instead of covering the same courses and research subjects.

“We pretend to give every 18-year-old qualified to go on to higher education the same experience at the same sort of institution. That represents an expensive and inefficient delusion.

“We should differentiate between different sorts of institution, prize these distinctions and devote our energy to ensure reasonable movement by students from one sort of institution to another according to ability.”

While Lord Patten’s suggestions are one solution, he seems to be completely disconnected to the fact that any uncapping would cause students to carry even higher debts into their working lives. It could bear a generation of debt-riddled young people who will face a difficult future and find it even more difficult to get on the property ladder for example.

He recently spoke out in Parliament against the government’s spending cuts, and said it was “lamentable” that Lord Mandelson was not replying to the debate. He said: “What we are actually seeing over the years 2012 to 2013 is the obliteration of the splurge of spending on higher education since 2005/06.”

However, he would do well to have listened to a fellow peer whose suggestions would be far less damaging to the education system and its students – Labour former Education Secretary Baroness Morris – who is Pro-Vice Chancellor of Sunderland University. She said that higher education had to adapt to deal with the cuts and consider ideas such as reducing the time it takes to do a degree: “We have a chance to create a new structure. Let’s take this crisis as an opportunity to do that.”

What are your thoughts? Should UK universities be able to charge large tuition fees like US institutions? Or would such uncapping create an elitist system where only the rich can buy a good education?