United Kingdom: Tory victory tremors

Tuition fees are likely to rise above the minimum £9,000 (Rs.8.8 lakh) per year to enable spending cuts proposed by the new Conservative government, senior leaders in education have suggested, as universities also prepare a œpowerful public campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union. The Tories™ election triumph will set in motion lobbying efforts by the sector on key issues including Europe and university funding, given that the party is committed to £30 billion (Rs.296,553 crore) in cuts. The department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), which includes research and higher education, is a non-protected department. Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of Universities UK (UUK), says one of the group™s priorities would be government funding because of the possibility that there œmay be an emergency budget preceding a broader spending review later in the year. That would raise œsome pretty urgent questions about the impact on the BIS budget, including research funding as a œtop priority, she told Times Higher Education. Within BIS, there could be pressure to prune the research budget or cut the remaining areas of direct public funding for university teaching (widening participation and high-cost subjects). Do the looming cuts to the BIS budget make it likely that a rise in fees might accompany them? œYes, I think that there may be (a rise), says Dandridge. œI think it™s something that we will be making explicit when we publish the work of our student funding panel¦ we™re still crafting our position on that. William Hague, the former Tory leader, said before the election that a rise in fees in the next Parliament had not been ruled out. And Vince Cable, the former Liberal Democrat business secretary who lost his seat in the general election, had previously suggested there would be œconsequences for universities from the policies of George Osborne, the chancellor. Last October at the Lib-Dem conference, Cable said: œ¦ there would be a significant increase in fees, a reduction in the (student loan repayment) threshold, and the thing which would save money would be really taking a lot of money out of student support ” effectively by stopping grants and turning them to loans, something of that kind. On Europe, the Conservatives are committed to holding an in-out referendum on EU membership by 2017, although there are suggestions that David Cameron could seek to hold the vote next year. UUK has previously said Britain™s universities could benefit from £1.2 billion a year in European research funding. According to Dandridge, UUK would be involved in œa public-facing campaign to talk very clearly and explicitly about the value of European membership and the damage¦that would be done if we were to leave. We hope it will be a powerful voice in that campaign. But I think we™ve got to move on that quite quickly because we don™t know the timescale of any referendum. University mergers wave University mergers are on the rise in Europe, according to a new report of the European University Association (EUA). The research…