My university announced their new undergraduate tuition fees today. The fee per year for full-time students starting this autumn will be £9,000. The new postgraduate fees haven’t been announced yet, but they will probably go up too.
Now I feel really lucky that I decided to start my studies last autumn even while I didn’t have all the funding in my pocket. The raises do not affect current students. We get to finish our degrees with the old fees. In the following years, there will be people sitting next to each other in the classes, getting exactly the same content and teaching, and some of them will be paying almost triple for it.
Looking at my application process now in hindsight, my fussing over the fees last summer seems almost ridiculous. I’m paying only £3,400 per annum. If the postgraduate fees are also raised to £9,000 I will be saving £11,200 during three years.
If the fees had gone up before I applied, I really don’t know whether I would have applied to Reading at all. Europe is full of universities and most of them would have been cheaper then.
EDIT: That last paragraph didn’t sound right. The Typography department in Reading is truly a world class expert in its field. And I am very very happy to be here. But there really are no Oxfords or Cambridges in graphic design. No departments which would be worth it, no matter the cost. When the prices are about the same, Reading clearly has an edge. But if Reading is almost three times as expensive as some of the closest competitors, one needs to think hard whether it is really worth the difference.
