Universities ‘will cut domestic places’ if EU secures lower fees

Offering home tuition fee status to European Union (EU) students would “make a very difficult financial situation worse”, the chief executive of Universities UK has warned, with domestic students likely to lose places as a result.

After reports suggested the EU was pushing for its students to pay domestic instead of international fees (currently £9,790 a year) as part of ongoing negotiations on youth mobility, Vivienne Stern said the UK government should “push back”.

Russell Group analysis has found including home tuition fee status for EU students could cost UK universities £580 million, with the association of research-intensive institutions calling instead for a “fair, balanced deal with the EU”.

Giving evidence to the House of Lords’ European Affairs committee on the Erasmus+ exchange scheme on 7 July, Stern said: “Our view has been that the government’s right to push back on this status…Under the current circumstances, with the financial pressures on the system, this would just make a very difficult situation worse and the government should therefore not do it.”

“I was speaking to one vice-chancellor this morning who said on the home fee question [for EU students who come to UK universities], ‘the consequence would be I would reduce the number of domestic students I admitted’,” Stern added.

“So you would end up constraining opportunities for UK students as a result of making this concession. Now I don’t know how widespread that would be. It’s one conversation with one vice-chancellor…But I think we should take it seriously.”

Stern also voiced concern that many universities could be put off participating in the Erasmus programme after the UK government signed a £570 million deal to rejoin in the 2027-28 academic year, following a six-year absence prompted by Brexit.

Despite expressing positivity about the potential Erasmus+ holds for students and researchers alike, Stern said she was “to be honest, worried” about participation rates at an organisational level owing to the costs.

“The outbound student pays just 15 per cent of their fee and the inbound student doesn’t pay a fee,” explained Stern. “So the seat is filled but the [UK] university receives just a fraction of the cost of the delivery.”

“I think that was always a barrier to institutional uptake of Erasmus and that will have gotten more difficult for universities to justify,” Stern said, referencing the sector’s current financial crisis.

“The interest [in Erasmus+] is very strong but I do worry that there will be a degree of rationing going on because of that cost problem.”

Stern said that, if money were no issue, it would have been preferable for the UK to have retained both Erasmus+ and Turing.

Turing, which launched in 2021, was intended as the post-Brexit replacement to the EU programme, but the government has decided to close it for the year that UK takes part in Erasmus+.

Supporters say that Turing has allowed for greater flexibility in terms of shorter exchanges and also placed more of a focus on widening access.

Stern emphasised that there will be a degree of lost “institutional memory” about how Erasmus+ operates – meaning colleges, universities, and other participating institutions will take time to get up to speed and to prove the programme’s worth.

For that reason, she said longer-term certainty about whether the UK will continue to participate in the scheme was necessary.

Stern pointed to growing confidence about the country’s involvement in Horizon Europe, the EU’s primary research funding programme, as an equivalent situation.

The UK officially joined the scheme in 2024, after a period of uncertainty about its future in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Participation rates have since bounced back to levels seen before the referendum. 

“I would say it will take us some time to build up momentum – we should expect that. We’ve seen that in Horizon,” she said.

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com