After months of discussion and speculation about how British universities will fill budget deficits, the UK government confirmed that tuition fees will be increasing to £9,535 a year in England in 2025. The impact of this price rise on graduates’ mental health in the years to come should not be underestimated, as new research my colleagues and I conducted shows.
The Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government increased tuition fees for English and Welsh undergraduate students starting university from 2012 onwards from around £3,500 a year to around £9,000 a year. In 2015, research my colleagues and I published compared the mental health of those who started university the year before or after this fee increase.
We found only a small effect on mental health, with those paying the higher fees having worse mental health than those paying lower fees at only one of four time points. We concluded that the tuition fee increase had little immediate effect on the mental health of students at the time.
