British university fees far too low says chancellor of Oxford

University fees in Britain are preposterously low, according to the chancellor of Oxford University.

Lord Patten says that the current tuition fees of £3,225 (€3,500) don’t even come close to covering the £16,000 (€18,000) it costs to educate a student for a year at Oxford.

Even with the aid of government grants British universities must raise half the fees themselves through private donations.

Lord Patten proposes that grants given by the government should be reduced, and that instead universities should be allowed to decide how much they want to charge students.

He says that this system should be introduced on the condition that students were still accepted onto courses based upon their intellectual merit and not whether they could afford to pay the fees.

America’s prestigious Ivy League universities charge ten times as much as British universities with undergraduate tuition at Harvard University costing over $33,000 (€24,500) annually.

There are no fees in place for university students in Ireland, with third level education being paid for by the taxpayer.

The current €1,500 registration charge paid each year is used to fund student services such as the Students’ Union.

DCU president Ferdinand von Prondzynski has long been an advocate for the reintroduction of tuition fees in Ireland saying that the funding offered by the government for higher education in this country is inadequate.

Speaking to the College View last year, von Prondzynski said that Irish universities are operating on about half the amount of money that a similar sized university in Britain operates on, and that the difference between funding available for American universities compared to Irish universities is much greater.

Questions were raised last month about the quality of the Irish education system when it emerged that that American multi-national companies were reluctant to hire Irish graduates due to a supposed fall in the quality of graduates and a rise in grade inflation.