How can we keep university study accessible and affordable?

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Dr Steve McCabe has been a lecturer at Birmingham City University since 1987 and has seen firsthand how the world of higher education has changed over the years.

Transcript

00:00In my 30-odd years of being in academia, students have gone from being consumers, if I should

00:07use that expression. It's not necessarily that they passively enjoy education, but it's

00:13changed the dynamics. Of course, students do go in as paying customers. Of course, the

00:18whole aspect of student fees, and most particularly when it was set at over £9,000, was to make

00:26universities much more competitive. Indeed, there is a league system that's always been

00:29there and we see students applying in huge numbers and oversubscribed to certain universities

00:35and less so for others. It's created this interesting market, which in better times

00:41was sustainable. The difficulty we have, of course, now is that for a variety of reasons,

00:46universities are finding their income stream is now less certain. Of course, it's making

00:52the continuous survival of some universities less certain than they might otherwise like

00:57to be. The worry is that the majority of this debt will never be paid off, with most

01:01being written off after 40 years. University study is now more accessible than ever, but

01:06how can we keep it that way? This amount of liability that students have at the end would

01:11increase if it went up to 15,000, 20,000. Indeed, do we want to end up in a situation

01:17like America where students go to university and your parents have to save from the moment

01:23they're born to be able to afford it? The difficulty is we've ended up in the worst

01:28of all places, a system which students are not particularly happy with, and their parents

01:33for that matter, and the universities are not particularly happy because they're not

01:36bringing enough money in to afford it. I have no instant solutions and I suspect that in

01:41the many things that the new Starmer government have got to look at will be the affordability

01:47and the funding of universities, but there are no easy answers. Of course, it's always

01:51about pumping extra money in, and of course the government have got lots of other priorities

01:55to deal with before they get to universities.

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