Nick Clegg's alma mater highlights 'significant funding gap' as it announces highest possible fees
It is the world's top university whose alumni include Nick Clegg. And now the Liberal Democrats' U-turn on tuition fees has paved the way for Cambridge University to charge £9,000 a year.
This morning we learnt that Clegg's alma mater has grabbed this opportunity. An internal university document is unequivocal:
The level of tuition fee charged from 2012 entry should be the maximum permissible, i.e. £9,000 pa with any subsequent adjustment for inflationary increases.
That raw headline will be a nuisance for Clegg and Vince Cable, another Cambridge graduate, who introduced the rise in tuition fees last year. But Cambridge is complying with the government's requirement for universities to offer support for less well off students if they charge the full £9,000 fee.
Cambridge is doing this in two ways:
• The £9,000 fees will be reduced to £6,000 for all students whose parents earn less than £25,000 a year.
• A bursary of £1,625 will be offered to students whose parents earn less than £25,000 a year.
These will be tapered to zero for students whose parents earn more than £42,000 a year.
But student leaders are not amused. They say that the £1,625 bursary represents a cut in the current maintenance bursary of £3,400.
One student told me:
Far from viewing this as a positive commitment from the university, students are in fact furious at this proposal. Maintenance bursaries (ie, money in students' pockets) are objectively better for students, whereas fee waivers (ie, reducing students' future tax liability, for the benefit of the Treasury by having to lend less) are primarily better for the Government's balance sheet.
Obviously, fee waivers have some benefit in terms of perception for those from the poorest backgrounds, but students receiving "cash in hand" has similar perceptual benefits as well as far greater benefits to students' financial position. On top of this, it also gives students the choice over whether they use the money to fund their experience at university or to reduce tuition fee loans. All the University has succeeded in doing is playing the game David Willetts asked of it: namely, shifting the "bursaries" so that they benefited the Treasury's borrowing figures instead of poor students' bank balances.
Cambridge University makes clear in its internal document that it is having to limit the maintenance bursary because of a "shortfall between cost and income". And what has caused that shortfall? Well that would be the cuts in higher education funding announced in the autumn spending review.
A graphic in the internal document makes clear that the university's income would have plummeted without the increase in tuition fees. But even with the £9,000 fees the university will still experience a "significant funding gap".