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  • Universities now need to be much clearer about the total cost of a course

    Universities now need to be much clearer about the total cost of a course

    Now that we know the undergraduate fee caps that will apply in England in 2026-27 and 2027-28, now seems like a good time to get something off my to-do list.

    For the sector, the headline is financial stability – after years of the fee cap being frozen while costs rose, two years of confirmed inflationary increases provide some relief.

    But the announcement also crystallises a compliance problem that has been building since April, when new price transparency provisions came into force under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

    Last week the Competition and Markets Authority published finalised guidance on Complying with the law on unfair commercial practices relating to price transparency.

    For a student starting a three-year degree next September, the total tuition cost is now entirely calculable. Year 1: £9,535. Year 2: £9,790. Year 3: £10,050. Total: £29,375.

    And yet university prospectuses and websites overwhelmingly advertise just the Year 1 figure – understating the actual three-year cost by nearly £2,000.

    Under the new CMA guidance that practice looks legally vulnerable. And, at least for England, OfS about to consult on applying a new “treating students fairly” condition to all registered providers, the regulatory architecture to enforce compliance is assembling itself.

    A note before I get going – the DMCC Act is UK-wide legislation, and the CMA’s price transparency requirements apply to universities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland just as they do in England.

    The OfS regulatory overlay – particularly Condition C5, whatever version of it gets applied to existing providers, and a presumption of non-compliance where consumer law has been breached – is England-specific.

    Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish universities don’t face the same automatic read-across from CMA findings to registration consequences. But they remain fully exposed to CMA enforcement, including direct fines and redress orders. It just means the enforcement route is different.

    £29,375. And the rest

    CMA209 is formal CMA guidance issued under the DMCC Act on the price transparency provisions – not HE-specific, but nothing in it carves higher education out.

    At its heart, it says that whenever a trader gives information about a product and its price, that is usually an “invitation to purchase” – and at that point the consumer must be given a realistic, meaningful and attainable total price, including any fees, taxes or other payments they will necessarily incur if they go ahead.

    The guidance defines “invitations to purchase” broadly – a website listing, an advert, a prospectus entry, an email, an instant message from an ambassador, so long as it indicates the characteristics of a product and its price and enables the consumer to decide whether to purchase or take some other “transactional decision.”

    Universities can’t rely on the detailed fee terms being buried on a separate page, or in the conditions of offer, to cure a misleading headline later in the journey.

    Three specific practices are now explicitly prohibited or heavily restricted:

    Drip pricing – showing one price up front and then introducing mandatory charges only later in the process – is now a prohibited practice under section 230 of the DMCC Act. The guidance is unambiguous:

    The practice of showing consumers an initial headline price for a product and subsequently introducing additional mandatory charges as consumers proceed with a purchase or transaction – sometimes called ‘drip pricing’ – is prohibited under the UCP provisions.

    Partitioned pricing – giving a list of components without also giving the overall total – is:

    …generally prohibited since it is not consistent with providing the ‘total price’ of the product.

    You can’t say “Tuition fee £X, additional compulsory course costs apply, see small print” without also giving either a single total price or, where that total genuinely cannot be calculated, a clear and prominent explanation of how it will be calculated.

    Non-prominent variable pricing information – where some part of the total price cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, traders must tell consumers how that part will be calculated, “with as much prominence as” any calculable components. A footnote in the terms and conditions will not do.

    Mandatory charges and hidden course costs

    The guidance is explicit that the “total price” must include any fees, taxes, charges or other payments that the consumer will necessarily incur. Mandatory charges include – per the guidance –

    administration fees, however described, such as booking or processing fees, quality assurance charges, platform charges… [and]… fees relating to additional services that cannot be avoided.

    Crucially, the guidance also says that charges arising from the trader’s own input costs – including the costs of third parties they choose to contract with – are mandatory and must be baked into the advertised price, not bolted on separately.

    Consumers have no control over such expenses. They cannot compare and select the third-party provider or products they use and have no way of opting out of them.

    I’m thinking maybe mandatory DBS and occupational health checks for health courses where the university organises the process, or compulsory field trip costs where the programme design offers no realistic non-paying route. Under CMA209, those all look like mandatory charges that should be rolled into the total price shown wherever the course and its fee are advertised – not left for discovery on a faculty web page in week three of term.

    The guidance is also explicit that merely calling something an “extra” or listing it separately does not make it optional:

    A charge is mandatory if the consumer will have to pay the additional charge in order to purchase or receive the advertised product. It is still a mandatory charge even if the consumer could theoretically avoid it by purchasing or signing up for an additional product.

    The guidance notes that refundable security deposits – money held against potential damage that’s “automatically refunded if not called upon” – don’t need to be included in the total price.

    But non-refundable deposits that form part of the purchase price are different. International students routinely pay substantial non-refundable deposits to secure places – often £1,000–3,000 or more, and sometimes 50 per cent of the first year’s fees.

    These are mandatory charges, payable before the student can even accept an offer. Under CMA209’s logic, the existence of the deposit, its amount, and the circumstances in which it might be forfeited are all material information that should be disclosed upfront – not discovered partway through the application process.

    The guidance’s emphasis on not introducing charges “later in the process” is directly relevant – if a student applies based on a headline fee figure and only later discovers they need to pay a substantial non-refundable deposit before they can confirm their place, that looks a lot like drip pricing.

    The “additional course costs” problem

    Plenty of universities maintain a separate page – often linked from the main fees section – listing “additional course costs” that students should “budget for.” Under CMA209, this structure is problematic on multiple fronts.

    First, where those costs are genuinely mandatory – DBS checks, professional registrations, required equipment – listing them separately is textbook partitioned pricing. The guidance is explicit:

    It is not enough to present the individual price components and expect the consumer to calculate the total price.

    A course page that shows tuition at £9,535 and then separately lists a £50 DBS check, £150 uniform and £120 professional body registration is doing exactly what CMA209 prohibits – presenting components without the total.

    Even where costs relate to optional modules, the guidance requires that variable pricing information be given “with as much prominence as” the calculable headline price. A link to a separate page does not constitute equal prominence.

    The “optional” categorisation itself deserves scrutiny. The guidance notes that a charge remains mandatory “even if the consumer could theoretically avoid it” through alternative choices.

    If a geology degree features fieldwork in its marketing, and the fieldwork module has a £500 field trip cost, the theoretical existence of non-fieldwork routes doesn’t make that cost optional for students buying the product as advertised.

    The test is whether the base price is “realistic, meaningful and attainable” for the degree as typically experienced – not whether a determined student could engineer a cheaper path through.

    Universities may need to audit every course’s additional costs and ask hard questions about what’s genuinely optional versus what’s mandatory in practice. The answer will often be uncomfortable. Oh, and the cost of resitting something also clearly needs more… clarity.

    Multi-year degrees and in-contract price increases

    The guidance has a specific section on “periodic pricing” – contracts where the consumer makes regular payments in return for ongoing services, such as subscriptions, gym memberships or broadband. It distinguishes between “rolling contracts” (can be cancelled any time, so the total price is just the price per period) and “minimum term contracts” (consumer commits for a defined period).

    For minimum term contracts, traders can either provide:

    ….the cumulative price that the consumer will have to pay over the entire minimum length of the contract, inclusive of all mandatory charges in that period

    …or provide:

    the total price that the consumer pays for each period of the contract… alongside a prominent statement of the number of months the consumer is committed to pay that price for.

    Most undergraduate degrees look very like a minimum-term periodic arrangement in substance. The student expects to be there for three or four years, paying annual tuition fees for ongoing access to teaching and services, and will normally make their transactional decision on the basis of the whole degree rather than a single year.

    The CMA’s own 2023 HE guidance reinforces this as follows:

    …the contract for educational services is for the full duration of the course, with milestones to be achieved in order to progress to the next year or other period of study.

    Applied to tuition fees, that raises some uncomfortable questions. If a university advertises fees at £9,535 for a three-year degree, is it in effect inviting the student into a three-year minimum term contract for services, with periodic payments due each year?

    If so, under CMA209 it should either present the total cumulative cost for the minimum term – or present a per-year total price plus a prominent statement of the minimum term, with any one-off fees (or, by analogy, any known annual increases) properly disclosed.

    Guidance was already clear that fee variation clauses are more likely to be fair if they include a “worked example” of how the clause might operate. Abstract percentages – “fees may increase by up to 5% annually” – don’t give consumers equivalent information to concrete pound figures.

    An international applicant who sees “£28,000” as the headline may not instinctively calculate that (“up to”) 5 per cent annual increases would mean approximately £88,200 over three years rather than £84,000 – a difference of over £4,000.

    For that percentage to have “as much prominence as” the headline price, it would need to be translated into the actual cost impact. This is particularly important for vulnerable consumers who may not run compound calculations when making application decisions.

    Universities might have argued that the total cost of a degree “cannot reasonably be calculated in advance” because future fee caps depend on inflation forecasts not yet made. For home UGs in England, that defence has now evaporated.

    Continuing to advertise “£9,535” when £29,375 is knowable would, under CMA209’s logic, be hard to reconcile with the requirement to provide the total price in an invitation to purchase.

    The guidance is explicit that traders should use any information already available to calculate the total price. The worked example for hotel bookings states that:

    …if a consumer searches for a ‘three-night stay for two people’ on a hotel booking website, the trader should use this information to calculate the total price based on those requirements including any per-transaction charges (and any other mandatory charges).

    By analogy – if a student is applying for a three-year degree starting in 2025, the university has all the information it needs to calculate and display the total cost.

    As we noted when the DMCC provisions came into force in April, vague claims that fees “may rise with inflation” may breach the rules if they fail to explain how, when, or by how much – or if that information isn’t given equal weight to the headline figure.

    Universities might argue that the “product” is access to one year of teaching and assessment, with progression to subsequent years being a separate (conditional) transaction. Under that framing, each year would be a genuinely rolling contract and the periodic pricing provisions wouldn’t require cumulative totals.

    The problem with that defence is threefold – it contradicts how universities market degrees (as three or four-year qualifications leading to awards), it contradicts the CMA’s own 2023 HE guidance on the duration of the educational services contract, and it would require universities to fundamentally redesign their offer letters, student contracts, and progression frameworks. It is not, I tentatively suggest, an easy pivot.

    The deferral problem

    The interaction between in-contract price increases and deferrals creates another drip pricing risk that universities may need to address.

    A student who applied for 2025 entry and accepts an offer does so on the basis of £9,535 fees. If they then defer to 2026, they face £9,790 – a £255 increase. The CMA’s 2023 HE guidance already flagged that deferrals require:

    …transparent information on the level of fees for that year if they could increase, and any other significant potential aspects of the course that you know will or may be different.

    Under CMA209, this looks like exactly the kind of later-revealed mandatory charge that the drip pricing prohibition targets. The student was shown one price when they made their transactional decision (accepting the offer), then charged a different, higher price when they actually enrol. Universities offering deferrals with “fees will be the rate applicable in your year of entry” are building this mechanism into their standard practice.

    The compliant approach would be to disclose at the point of offer – or certainly at the point of accepting a deferral – what the Year 1 fee for 2026 entry will be, what the total degree cost will be (using the now-known 2026-27, 2027-28, and projected 2028-29 figures), and how this differs from the cost had the student started in 2025. Anything less risks a student committing to defer without understanding the price implications.

    Non-standard degree structures

    The DfE announcement also creates specific presentation challenges for degrees that don’t follow the standard three-year full-time model.

    Foundation years: The announcement confirms that classroom-based foundation years remain frozen at 2025-26 levels while subsequent years increase. A four-year programme with a foundation year therefore has a complex cost profile: Year 0 at one price, Years 1–3 escalating. You cannot simply multiply the Year 1 fee by four – and the total will be different from a standard three-year degree starting in the same year. How should universities present this? The CMA209 logic suggests they need to show the actual cumulative total for the specific programme structure, not an indicative per-year figure that doesn’t reflect reality.

    Placement years and years abroad: Different percentage caps apply – 20 per cent of the full fee for sandwich placements, 15 per cent for years abroad and Turing years. A four-year degree with a placement year has three years at full fee and one at 20 per cent, while a degree with a year abroad has three at full fee and one at 15 per cent. For a 2025 entrant on a four-year sandwich course, the calculation would be £9,535 (Year 1) + £9,790 (Year 2, placement) × 20% + £10,050 (Year 3) + [2028–29 fee] (Year 4) – giving a total of around £21,543 plus the unknown final year. Universities need to work through these calculations for every programme variant and present the results clearly.

    Accelerated degrees: Two-year accelerated degrees have higher annual caps (£11,750 for 2026-27, £12,060 for 2027-28). A student choosing between a standard three-year degree and an accelerated two-year version is making a comparison that matters – £29,375 over three years versus approximately £23,810 over two years (for a 2026 entrant). CMA209’s requirement that prices be “realistic, meaningful and attainable” for the product as advertised suggests universities should be helping students make this comparison, not obscuring it with per-year figures that don’t facilitate like-for-like assessment.

    Part-time study: Part-time degrees stretch over 4–6+ years, accumulating more annual increases. The maths becomes more complex and the cumulative cost may substantially exceed the nominal fee multiplied by FTE years. Again, the guidance suggests universities should be doing this calculation for students, not leaving them to work it out themselves.

    Home students versus international students

    For home students in England, the government has now confirmed two years of fee increases, with a stated intention to legislate for automatic annual uprating thereafter. Ironically, the specific inflation measure remains technically unconfirmed – the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper indicated fees would rise “in line with inflation” but didn’t specify which index.

    You and I know that the figures are the OBR’s projections of inflation as of today, but that’s hardly an “objective verifiable inflation index.” Universities can at least show the trajectory for students whose entire degree is now priced.

    For international students, the position is much more exposed. Here, fee-setting is entirely at the university’s discretion, and annual uplifts of several hundred pounds – or several per cent – are routine.

    If a university can state “fees will increase by up to X per cent annually,” then it can calculate a maximum total cost for the degree. The guidance’s logic would suggest it should be displaying that maximum – or at minimum, the inflation cap and worked examples – with equal prominence to the Year 1 headline figure. Asking a student to commit to a multi-year programme on the basis of “£28,000 in year 1 – fees may rise in future years” without any structure looks exactly like the sort of thing this guidance is trying to stamp out.

    The universities that have moved to fixed-fee guarantees are in the cleanest compliance position. If the fee genuinely won’t increase, you can advertise Year 1 and the cumulative total is just three or four times that figure. Everyone else – particularly those with vague “may increase with inflation” language buried in terms – is more exposed.

    The deposits problem

    The deposit practices that have become widespread in international recruitment also deserve particular scrutiny under the new framework.

    According to UUKi survey data from last year, two thirds of providers charge deposits for international students at a specific monetary amount, with a further 17 per cent setting deposits as a percentage of the tuition fee – often 50 per cent.

    Universities have been encouraged to set earlier deadlines for applications and deposits as a way of “managing risk” – but the effect is to shift that risk onto students, who must commit substantial sums before they have complete information about accommodation, living costs, or visa outcomes.

    Of course universities have been explicitly encouraged to use deposits to reduce the likelihood of students transferring out of the degree programme. The logic is straightforward – if a student has already paid £5,000–15,000 that they’ll lose if they change their mind, they’re locked in.

    But that sits uncomfortably with OfS Condition F2, which requires registered providers to publish clear information about transfer arrangements – and with OfS’ legal duty to monitor the availability and utilisation of student transfer schemes.

    More broadly, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 already constrains what universities can do. Cancellation or early termination charges must be limited to what is “fair and proportionate” – meaning the university can recover its genuine costs or lost profit, but cannot levy charges designed to punish students for changing their mind or to scare them into staying in the contract.

    When challenged, universities might argue that the CAS allocated to the student could have gone to someone else, so they’ve lost the profit they would have made. But if the university hasn’t actually recruited to its CAS allocation – if numbers are down and places remain unfilled – that argument collapses.

    CMA’s existing guidance is clear that traders can only retain money to cover actual costs and losses, not to enforce compliance targets or prevent student choice. Universities aren’t really allowed to shift the burden of their regulatory obligations or commercial risks onto students.

    DMCC adds further layers. Under the duty of professional diligence, universities must act with the skill, care, and honesty that a reasonable trader should exercise in line with good market practice.

    Breaching that duty becomes unlawful when it distorts, or risks distorting, a consumer’s decision-making – a bar that drops further when the consumers in question are vulnerable. Practices that exploit a student’s weakness, confusion, or lack of experience can breach the Act even if no actual loss can yet be proven.

    OfS’ own prohibited behaviours list – currently applicable only to new registrants but expected to be extended – includes:

    …requiring a student to pay a disproportionately high sum of money as penalty to the provider or for services which have not yet been supplied, where the student decides not to sign the contract or withdraws from the contract after signing it.

    In its consultation response, OfS argued that the prohibited behaviours it was proposing closely reflect existing legal requirements “with which traders in any sector are required to comply.”

    If that’s right, then the current deposit practices of many universities may in many cases already be legally questionable – the prohibited behaviours list just makes explicit the kinds of practices consumer protection law is already concerned about.

    The interaction with immigration policy is awkward. The Legal Migration white paper signalled that UKVI will soon be demanding visa refusal rates of less than 10 per cent and course enrolment rates of at least 90 per cent of CASs issued.

    In the C5 consultation, one respondent suggested that OfS should work closely with UKVI to “agree a position on non-repayment of deposits for visa-sponsored students” – presumably because universities are using deposit forfeiture to manage these compliance targets.

    But again – universities can’t shift the burden of their regulatory obligations onto students. If a student’s visa is refused through no fault of their own, or if they withdraw before enrolment for legitimate reasons, treating a 50 per cent deposit as simply forfeited looks difficult to defend as “fair and proportionate” under consumer protection law.

    Postgraduate provision

    I’ve focused on undergraduate study here, but the transparency issues are at least as acute – arguably more so – for postgraduate provision.

    Taught masters programmes of one year limit the in-contract increase problem. But doctoral programmes run for 3–4+ years, with annual fee increases that are often entirely uncapped for international students. A PhD student starting at £25,000 per year with 5 per cent annual increases faces a four-year total of over £107,000 – significantly more than £100,000 if they’d assumed stable fees.

    The sums involved make transparency even more important, and current practice is often worse than undergraduate – many doctoral programme pages show only the current-year fee with no indication of how it will change.

    Postgraduate loans for home students are capped and don’t cover the full cost of many programmes, creating an additional transparency issue – the gap between the loan available and the fee charged is itself a mandatory cost that students need to understand upfront.

    The deposit problem is particularly tricky for international PGT students. A student who paid a 50 per cent deposit on a £20,000 masters programme – £10,000 – and then changed their mind about the course, or had accommodation fall through, or discovered that the cost of living information the university supplied was three years out of date, faces losing that entire sum unless they fit restrictive refund criteria.

    They’re locked in, or they’re out of pocket – and the consumer protection framework suggests many of those lock-ins may be unfair.

    Agents and intermediaries

    The guidance is explicit that both the party making an invitation to purchase and the trader on whose behalf it is made can be liable:

    If the product is being marketed on the seller’s behalf or in their name, the seller may also be responsible if the invitation to purchase fails to comply with the requirements of the UCP provisions.

    This has big implications for a sector that has become heavily dependent on international recruitment agents. Agents are involved in over 50 per cent of international student admissions – in some markets, the figure reaches 70 per cent.

    Under CMA209, if an agent in Lagos or Mumbai is advertising “Study at [University] for £22,000” without disclosing annual increases or the mechanism by which fees will rise, both the agent and the university are potentially in breach of the price transparency provisions.

    The guidance says that traders using other businesses to market their products must ensure they have provided those businesses with all the information required by the DMCC Act, and must also ensure that those businesses are complying with their obligations under the DMCC Act.

    If we’re honest, that’s compliance burden most universities are not currently equipped to manage. Many do not systematically audit agent materials. Commission arrangements are commercially sensitive and rarely transparent. Sub-agents – informal intermediaries whose details may not even be known to the contracting university – add further layers of opacity.

    The guidance creates, at minimum, an expectation that universities will need much tighter control over what partners and agents say about fees and increases.

    The guidance also notes that:

    …if an invitation to purchase is directed at UK consumers, it must comply with the relevant UCP provisions, even if the trader making the invitation to purchase is located outside the UK.”

    That jurisdictional reach catches overseas agents advertising to prospective international students who will study in the UK.

    Bang average

    Consumer protection law uses an “average consumer” test – would the practice mislead or affect the transactional decision of a typical consumer? But that test isn’t applied uniformly.

    Where a practice is directed at a particular group, the average consumer is judged by reference to that group. And where a practice is likely to materially distort the behaviour of consumers who are “particularly vulnerable” due to mental or physical infirmity, age, or credulity, it’s assessed from the perspective of the average member of that vulnerable group.

    DMCC recognises that vulnerability can arise from permanent characteristics – age, disability, low literacy – or from temporary circumstances like bereavement, financial stress, or life crisis.

    Applying from abroad to study in an unfamiliar country, navigating a complex visa system, relying on agents whose incentives may not align with your own, committing substantial deposits before you have complete information – all of this creates vulnerability in the consumer protection sense.

    In higher education, several groups of students could reasonably be considered vulnerable consumers in this context:

    International students face acute information asymmetry. They may be unfamiliar with UK consumer protection norms, language barriers may affect comprehension of complex fee terms, they’re making decisions from a distance often based on agent advice, and the financial stakes – total cost of attendance including living costs, visas, flights – are enormous. The combination of agent recruitment practices and student vulnerability is a killer – agents have financial incentives that may not align with student interests, students may not know agents are paid by universities, and the power imbalance is huge.

    Young people – most undergraduate applicants are 17ish when they make application decisions – are making one of the largest financial commitments of their lives with limited experience of contracts, consumer rights, or long-term financial planning. The guidance’s examples of misleading practices often involve consumers failing to notice or understand pricing complexity – that risk is heightened for young people navigating an unfamiliar system.

    First-generation HE students lack family knowledge to draw on. They may not know what questions to ask, may be more susceptible to impressive-sounding marketing claims, and may not have access to informal networks that help more advantaged students navigate the system.

    Students from disadvantaged backgrounds have a different vulnerability – the financial implications of hidden costs or unexpected fee increases fall harder on those with less family buffer. The same opaque pricing that a wealthy student might absorb as an inconvenience could derail the plans of a student with no margin for error.

    DMCC requires traders to design their sales practices, contracts, and communications with these vulnerabilities in mind. It is no defence to say that the “average” consumer would cope – if a foreseeable group of people is likely to be misled, disadvantaged, or harmed, the practice breaches the Act.

    The duty of professional diligence demands that universities act with the skill, care, and honesty that a reasonable trader should exercise in line with good market practice. Practices that (even inadvertently) exploit weakness, confusion, or lack of experience can be unlawful even if no actual loss can yet be proven.

    If university marketing practices disproportionately affect vulnerable groups – and there’s good reason to think they do – the compliance standard should be assessed accordingly.

    A fee presentation that might not mislead an experienced, sophisticated consumer could still breach the rules if it’s likely to mislead the students actually being recruited. The “average consumer” for an international recruitment agent’s materials isn’t a UK-based parent with professional advice – it’s someone in China, Nigeria or India trying to understand what three years of study will actually cost.

    OfS is coming

    If all of this feels a bit theoretical – the CMA has guidance, but will anyone actually enforce it? – OfS’ parallel moves should concentrate minds.

    OfS has already been pointing providers in this direction:

    …if providers are making changes that increase fees for new entrants in line with prescribed limits, they should make sure that prospective students have access to information about the full cost of their course, for the duration of the course, before they commit themselves to undertaking a higher education course.

    That language – “full cost of their course, for the duration of the course, before they commit” – is close to what CMA209 now makes a legal requirement. The sector can’t reasonably claim it had no warning.

    OfS has also established an important ceiling for continuing students – they can’t be charged more than the lower of either the relevant prescribed fee limit, or the level to which fees can be increased in line with the inflationary statement recorded in the Access and Participation Plan (or annual fee information return) that was in effect in their year of entry.

    That inflationary statement mechanism – which effectively caps what returning students can be charged – creates a documented ceiling that universities could, in principle, use to calculate and disclose maximum cumulative costs at the point of admission.

    It also means that the universities on my spreadsheet that have already increased their fees for continuing students beyond that which was committed to in the APP are very much risking it for a biscuit.

    Sinclair C5

    Of course OfS has published a new initial condition of registration, C5 (“Treating students fairly”), a version of which it says it will consult on applying to existing registered providers imminently. The condition is currently in force for new registrants – extending it to the existing register would make fee transparency a live regulatory issue for every provider in England.

    C5’s version of “consumer protection law” explicitly includes the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 – so non-compliance with CMA209’s price transparency provisions would directly implicate the condition. And the scope is, if anything, broader than CMA209 itself.

    The condition covers:

    …any arrangements the provider has made or plans to make to attract individuals to study at the provider, encourage individuals to submit applications to study at the provider, or to otherwise communicate with students or anyone with an interest in studying at the provider.

    The accompanying guidance defines “information about the provider” as anything individuals may rely on in their decision-making – including:

    …emails or other forms of communication; presentations delivered at open days; any written material used to inform communications (such as scripts for recruitment phone calls).

    On agents, C5 is if anything more explicit than CMA209. The guidance states that:

    …where a provider works with recruitment agents or other entities similarly working on its behalf, it will be held accountable for their behaviour.”

    And the provider must:

    …undertake appropriate due diligence on all third parties and on all third parties’ arrangements.

    On partnerships, the condition “applies to all higher education provided through all forms of partnership arrangements” and may result in “more than one provider being responsible for compliance with this condition in relation to the same student.”

    Delivery providers in franchise arrangements will have to must submit lead provider documents – including “template student contracts (including terms related to tuition fees and additional costs)” – and if they think those documents contain problematic provisions, they’re expected to work with the lead provider to address this before applying for registration.

    What are universities actually selling?

    More broadly, the price transparency requirements raise an uncomfortable question – what, exactly, is the “product” that universities advertise?

    Prospectuses don’t just show lecture theatres and libraries. They feature students playing sports, performing in shows, running societies, going on trips. Open days tour the SU facilities. Marketing copy talks about “joining a vibrant community” and “making friends for life.”

    If that’s part of how the product is marketed, CMA209 suggests it’s part of the product – and if accessing it costs extra, those costs are material information. A university advertising a “great and vibrant SU” without mentioning that club membership fees typically run to £5–50 per society, that sports clubs charge for kit and fixtures, and that participation in activities often costs money beyond tuition, is arguably presenting a version of the product whose price doesn’t reflect what students would actually pay to access it.

    Where a free inter-campus bus or shuttle is part of that promotional bundle – the thing that makes a multi-site timetable viable without extra cost – withdrawing it mid-course effectively increases the mandatory costs faced by students. At minimum, that raises the same kinds of questions about hidden charges and changes to the product that the price transparency regime is designed to address.

    For students from lower-income backgrounds who chose the university partly based on its marketed student life, discovering the hidden costs of participation is a form of bait-and-switch – even if legally defensible.

    The logic extends to living costs. Section 227 of the DMCC Act prohibits misleading omissions – failing to provide material information that consumers need for informed decisions. For students choosing between universities, living costs are often the second-largest expense after tuition, and they vary enormously by location. A student choosing between London and a smaller city could face a £15,000+ difference over three years – that’s material.

    Where universities make claims about accommodation, those claims must be accurate. “Affordable accommodation from £X per week” is misleading if that figure refers only to heavily oversubscribed halls available only to first-years, while most students pay significantly more in the private rented sector. Marketing materials featuring halls and campus living are potentially misleading if most students spend most of their degree in private accommodation of significantly lower quality at higher cost.

    Even a university in a notably expensive area that makes living costs look lower than they really are in its marketing may be committing a misleading omission – and OfS’ Condition C5 reinforces this by covering:

    …anything individuals may rely on in their decision making about whether (or what) to study at the provider.

    What happens now

    The unfair commercial practices provisions of the DMCC Act came into force on 6 April 2025. This is not prospective regulation – it applies now. The CMA has indicated it will update its sector-specific guidance in light of the new Act, but no timetable has been given for HE – and the absence of sector-specific guidance does not provide a grace period.

    The CMA now has direct enforcement powers under the DMCC Act. It doesn’t need to go to court to determine that an infringement has occurred – it can make that determination itself and impose financial penalties directly on businesses and individuals. The reputational and financial exposure for non-compliance has increased substantially.

    There will be some in the sector suggesting this is all rather tiresome – more compliance burden when universities should be focused on teaching and research or restructuring for survival. Sure, sure – but for me, that response misses the point.

    Consider what the current system asks of applicants. A 17-year-old browsing a website is expected to notice that £9,535 is a Year 1 figure, intuit that fees will rise annually, locate the relevant inflation mechanism buried in terms and conditions, run compound calculations across three or four years, and identify which “additional course costs” are genuinely optional versus effectively mandatory – all while simultaneously choosing A-levels and writing personal statements.

    It’s not a reasonable expectation. It’s a system designed by people who understand it for people who don’t, and the information asymmetry falls hardest on exactly the students who can least afford to get it wrong – first-generation applicants without family knowledge to draw on, international students navigating an unfamiliar system from thousands of miles away, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds with no financial buffer for unexpected costs.

    I’m no lawyer, and some of the above might not turn out to be technically required, but it seems to me that the point here isn’t to do the bare minimum to stay on the right side of the CMA, or in England, OfS.

    It’s to recognise that when you transfer the cost of higher education onto students and graduates – when you ask them to take on £30,000, £50,000, £80,000 of debt for a degree – you take on a corresponding obligation to help them understand what they’re buying and what they’ll pay. That means straining every sinew to make pricing clear, not hunting for loopholes that let you technically comply while keeping the complexity intact.

    In other words, however much of a pain in the arse it is, transparency isn’t bureaucratic overreach. It’s just what fairness looks like when you write it down.

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  • The post-matrix university – trust, relevance, and the politics of plugging back in

    The post-matrix university – trust, relevance, and the politics of plugging back in

    Earlier this year the University of East London’s Child Online Harms Policy Think Tank, launched in the House of Lords. At that launch, I first properly heard a phrase I’d only half-registered before, but which I now can’t stop thinking about: “escaping the matrix.”

    For some young people, especially those immersed in online influencer culture, the phrase signals a rejection of conformity – a desire to think critically about the systems they’ve inherited. In its healthiest form, it’s scepticism. But in darker online spaces – the so-called “manosphere” – that questioning turns toxic. The “matrix” becomes a conspiracy; feminism is blamed for personal hardship; and traditional institutions, universities included, are dismissed as irrelevant or even hostile.

    Here’s the irony: many of the same influencers peddling these anti-institution narratives are running their own “universities” – online courses, masterclasses, mentorships. The hunger to learn hasn’t gone away. What’s being rejected isn’t learning – in fact, more 18-year-olds than ever entered higher education this year – but the institutions seen to control it.

    So, what should universities make of this moment? The answer is not to bend to the whims of misogynist influencers, but to reflect on why so many young people feel alienated from formal education. What is the role of higher education in a world where disaffection is marketed as enlightenment? And how might we create – and communicate – a post-matrix university that feels worth plugging into?

    Build a better matrix

    At UEL, we’ve been challenging ourselves on what “value” really means in a rapidly changing world. For us, that has meant a deep commitment to becoming a careers-first university. Over the last seven years, we’ve redesigned our curriculum and embedded employability into every aspect of the institution, aligning what we teach with the skills and opportunities our students need to thrive.

    By embedding careers throughout study; forging deep, value-adding partnerships with employers; breaking down the barriers between learning, innovation and work; and developing validated, leaner and more predictive-of-success recruitment pipelines, we have lifted graduate employment rates by 25 percentage points in just five years, the fastest rise in England. Our enterprise support tells a similar story, as we have driven the sector’s fastest increase in graduate start-ups, with a 1000 per cent increase in businesses still active after three years.

    This is not the only approach, nor the only vision for value. The government’s recent white paper encourages greater specialisation, and I have always believed that a diverse higher education sector is a strong one. But that diversity only thrives in a healthy ecosystem – not one pulling in all directions and competing for diminishing resources.

    If universities are to prove their continuing value to students, graduates, families, government, businesses, and communities, we must work together. Just not in the same old ways. That is where government can play a smarter role: not by propping up legacy systems or mandating mergers, but by rewarding genuine innovation and collaboration.

    Take employers

    Research launched by UEL and London Economics at this year’s Labour Conference found that 97 per cent of businesses want closer partnerships with universities. Nearly nine in ten back a national digital “front door” – a single online platform connecting graduates and employers, streamlining recruitment, and supporting lifelong professional development.

    Our students tell us they don’t just want a graduate job – they want a graduate career. Students are not just job seekers; they are job creators too. Meeting that ambition means building systemic partnerships that align degrees with the demands of a changing generation; innovative, connected investment in practice-based education; and giving employers confidence that universities are developing the higher skilled and enterprising talent they need.

    Graduate recruitment has become a hall of mirrors: AI-generated applications screened by AI filters, relying on crude, out-dated proxies for talent that do not predict new routes for success. Real, diverse potential is lost in this algorithmic echo chamber and the approach is – at least in part – contributing to a 59 per cent increase in applications per graduate vacancy in just one year. The current model is working for too few: graduates underemployed, employers frustrated, trust eroded.

    By listening to what students and businesses are telling us, even when those truths are uncomfortable, we can respond with something better: an education that is relevant, transformative, and visibly worth the investment of time, trust, and money; together with the collaborative recruitment practices that succeed both for future talent and the businesses that need them.

    That, to me, is the essence of the “post-matrix university”: one that closes the gap between institution and individual, between learning and livelihood, between aspiration and outcome. It’s a university that earns trust not through authority, but through authenticity – proving that education isn’t an escape from reality, but a way to change it.

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  • Chancellor Tade Oyerinde’s Congressional Testimony on Campus & Higher Ed (Campus.edu)

    Chancellor Tade Oyerinde’s Congressional Testimony on Campus & Higher Ed (Campus.edu)







    Higher Education Inquirer : Chancellor Tade Oyerinde’s Congressional Testimony on Campus & Higher Ed (Campus.edu)




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  • Education Department seeks delay in landmark borrower defense settlement

    Education Department seeks delay in landmark borrower defense settlement

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    Dive Brief: 

    • The U.S. Department of Education is asking a federal judge for an 18-month extension to decide borrower defense claims from students who were promised decisions by January — or automatic relief if their cases aren’t resolved by then. 
    • The nearly 200,000 borrowers still awaiting decisions are covered by a landmark 2022 settlement that promised automatic debt relief or timely decisions based on when borrowers filed claims and what institutions they attended.
    • The Project on Predatory Student Lending, a nonprofit legal firm representing the borrowers, urged the judge overseeing the case to reject the Education Department’s request for an extension. “It is time for the Department to hold to its commitments and move this Settlement to its final phase,” the group said in a Nov. 21 court filing. 

    Dive Insight: 

    The settlement in the Sweet v. McMahon case stems from a class-action lawsuit filed during the first Trump administration that accused the Education Department of stonewalling decisions on applications for borrower defense to repayment, a federal program that provides debt relief to students defrauded by their colleges. 

    The settlement divided borrowers into three groups. 

    It granted automatic relief to the first group, which was composed of roughly 200,000 borrowers who attended one of the 151 colleges listed by the department. The list was dominated by for-profit institutions, including both large chains that had shuttered and still-operating colleges. 

    The second group was promised timely decisions, or automatic relief if the Education Department didn’t meet certain deadlines. The agency told the court earlier this year it had resolved many of those cases, and will provide another update in December. 

    And the last group — which is now facing a potential delay — is composed of the 207,000 people who filed over 251,000 borrower defense claims after the settlement had been struck but before it received final court approval. 

    The Biden administration’s Education Department promised to make timely decisions on their cases — or else provide automatic relief to them by Jan. 28 of next year. Now, the department under President Donald Trump is requesting to move that deadline back to July 2027. 

    In a Nov. 6 court filing, the agency said it lacked the resources to quickly issue decisions on such a large pool of applications. 

    “The Department has not received the resources that are needed to adjudicate post-class applications — Congress repeatedly ignored requests for funding to increase staffing to the levels the Department deemed necessary to fully implement the settlement,” the agency said, adding that its Federal Student Aid office “has instead seen staffing dwindle at the time when resources for postclass adjudication are most needed.”

    Trump signed an order to close the Education Department to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law” and has asked Congress to reduce its funding.  

    The Education Department has cut its staff roughly in half under Trump and moved to outsource its programs to other federal agencies without first seeking congressional approval — a move some say could be a violation of the law. 

    The department said it is now adjudicating about 1,500 borrower defense applications each month for the final settlement group. As of Oct. 31, it had issued decisions on almost 54,000 of the final group’s applications. 

    It projected that roughly 193,000 borrower defense applications covered by the settlement would still lack decisions by the January deadline. Those borrowers’ outstanding loan balances total $11.8 billion, the Education Department said in court documents. It also said about half of the group’s borrower defense claims have so far been denied. 

    In a statement Wednesday, Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent the Trump administration is requesting more time so taxpayers aren’t “burdened with discharges for ineligible borrowers.”

    “Although the Department has complied with the Court’s deadlines in good faith, the upcoming January deadline is unreasonable,” Kent said. “Without adequate time to review each outstanding borrower defense case, taxpayers could be forced to shoulder $6 billion in windfall discharges for ineligible borrowers, based on the Department’s current adjudication patterns.” 

    In response to the Education Department’s request, lawyers for the borrowers slammed the department’s request. 

    “Less than 12 weeks before the deadline, the Department reveals that not only is it behind schedule to meet that deadline, it never had a prayer of meeting the deadline,” they said. “Out of more than 251,000 Post-Class applications, it has adjudicated fewer than 54,000 — barely one-fifth.”

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  • Education Department outsourcing is unlawful, amended lawsuit claims

    Education Department outsourcing is unlawful, amended lawsuit claims

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    The U.S. Department of Education’s plans to move core programming to other agencies is illegal and harmful to K-12 and higher education students, educators and families, according to an amended lawsuit filed Tuesday.

    Brought forth by a broad coalition of school districts, employee unions and a disability rights organization, the amended complaint seeks to halt the outsourcing of Education Department programs. 

    “Taking away the services and supports students rely on will irreparably hurt children, families, educators, schools, and communities, in states across the nation,” said a Tuesday statement by Democracy Forward, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case. “The Department of Education offers important support to educators and communities throughout the nation and the unlawful attempts to shut down the Department are nothing less than an abandonment of the future of our country.”

    In a statement emailed to K-12 Dive on Wednesday, Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Education Department, said, “It’s no surprise that blue states and unions care more about preserving the DC bureaucracy than about giving parents, students, and teachers more control over education and improving the efficient delivery of funds and services.”

    On Nov. 18, the Education Department announced it was developing interagency agreements with other federal agencies to support six programs, including with the U.S. Department of Labor to handle the management of about $28 billion in K-12 funding for low-income school districts, homeless youth, migrant students, academic support, afterschool programs, districts receiving Impact Aid and other activities.

    Another interagency agreement places about $3.1 billion in institution-based grants for postsecondary education programming at the Labor Department.

    The moves add to a partnership the Education Department created with the Labor Department earlier this year to take over the management of federal career and technical assistance programs. Democratic lawmakers, during a Nov. 19 House Education and Workforce subcommittee hearing, said several state CTE programs ran into funding delays due to a new grant management process at the Labor Department.

    While the Education Department does not yet have formal plans to move the management of special education, civil rights enforcement and federal student aid out of the agency, those options are still being explored, a senior department official said during a press call on Nov. 18.

    Even when programming shifts under the interagency agreements, the Education Department would still be the agency responsible for these programs, with the partner agencies taking on much of the daily operations.

    The Trump administration has said the continual downsizing of the Education Department is meant to reduce federal bureaucracy and give states more autonomy over spending allocations.

    During a White House press conference Nov. 20, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said there’s been a “hard reset” of the country’s educational system. “That reset was a campaign promise from President Trump to send education back to the states and end Washington’s micromanagement of education once and for all,” McMahon said. 

    Critics, however, say the disruptions from shifting agency responsibilities, along with Education Department staff reductions and delays in grant funding, is causing havoc for K-12 and higher education systems. 

    The updated complaint in Somerville v. Trump, which was consolidated with New York v. McMahon, was brought against the Education Department by groups of states, school districts and teacher unions. The Arc of the United States is now an additional plaintiff in the case.

    The cases were heard earlier this year before district and appeals courts, which issued and upheld injunctions blocking the administration’s actions. In July, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request for a stay allowing the changes at the Education Department to take place for now.

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  • How to combat misinformation and disinformation in the classroom

    How to combat misinformation and disinformation in the classroom

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    Dive Brief:

    • As students spend more time on digital media, and as misinformation — and disinformation — continues to infiltrate those platforms, how should educators react? Experts say they should take a meta approach that educates students in digital literacy and gently but persistently questions conspiracies rather than arguing. 
    • Media literacy needs to be infused throughout the curriculum because students are consuming media related to every subject, said Eisha Buch, head of teaching and learning at Common Sense Media. 
    • While facts and information debunk those theories, students who believe them shouldn’t be put on the defensive. “Give students the tools to reflect as much as they can, with open-ended, non-judgmental questions,” said Noah Rauch, senior vice president of education and public programs for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. “Get students to think about their own thinking.”

    Dive Insight:

    Media literacy is as critical as teaching students to read, write and do math, said Buch. The urgency for the subject comes with the rise of artificial intelligence and the ongoing circulation of conspiracy theories about everything from 9/11 to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

    “Debunking conspiracy theories is part of media literacy,” but it’s not the place to start, said Buch. “It’s about understanding the media ecosystem that allows such content to flourish.”

    Many museums offer resources for educators, including the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, which has a variety of programs and resources for schools and teachers to talk about the tragedy. These include physical and virtual field trips, as well as professional development opportunities for educators at the museum, online and at conferences around the country, Rauch said.

    Some of this programming focuses both on debunking particular conspiracy theories and on critical thinking, often starting with the Occam’s razor principle. “The simplest explanation is often the correct one,” Rauch said, adding, “If you belittle an idea, it’s going to force people into a corner.”

    Such techniques are certainly not limited to combating misinformation and disinformation about 9/11, Rauch said. 

    Educators should ask students, “What’s the goal of the conspiracy? How many people would need to be involved?” he said. “Is there any piece of evidence we can give you that might change your mind?” 

    For educators to succeed in these meta-strategies, they first need to understand the attention economy — in which companies compete for individuals’ attention as a commodity — and how it works, and then instill that understanding in students, Buch said.

    This would include asking who profits off of the content, why the content exists, and who it serves. Then, educators should ask students to decide whether they want to engage with a given post or news story, or decide to ignore it, Buch said. If a student decides to engage, they should think critically and stay curious, Buch said.

    Especially in an AI-fueled world, students should not “go super-deep on one particular post — go wide, on different sources,” she said. “This is, admittedly, the hardest piece, especially with AI: You can find multiple sources that still give you the wrong information.”

    Students should also be urged to check their emotional responses, Buch said. 

    “If something makes you furious or excited, it’s worthwhile to pause and think,” she said. “Strong emotions work against your ability to think critically. Disinformation is trying to bypass the rational frame.” 

    Educators should continuously practice these measures in class — even, Buch said.  with reliable sources of information. 

    “Everything you see online is tied to an incentive model in some way,” Buch added. “You’re not trying to teach kids to be cynical, but you do want them to think critically.”

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  • ‘Aztecs Read’ initiative sparks fluency, proficiency in Missouri charter

    ‘Aztecs Read’ initiative sparks fluency, proficiency in Missouri charter

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    Dive Brief:

    • Guadalupe Centers Middle School in Kansas City, Missouri, increased reading achievement among students in grades 6-8 through its Aztecs Read initiative, despite not having a school librarian. 
    • The initiative at the Title I charter school where 70% of students identified as English learners helped establish classroom libraries, host author visits and hold reading challenges.   
    • Schools that lack librarians need to get creative to ensure that they’re adequately nurturing young readers. Nearly 30% of public schools operated without even a part-time librarian in 2020-21, up from 25% in the mid-2010s, according to data from a joint report titled “Schools Without Librarians,” published in 2024 by Antioch University Seattle and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

    Dive Insight:

    The need for literacy experts is especially pronounced in charter schools, 70% of which had no librarian in 2020-21, according to the joint report. Of smaller schools with under 200 students, nearly two-thirds lacked librarians, as did about a third of high-poverty schools, the report noted.

    Although Guadalupe Centers Middle School lacks a library, in the wake of the school’s recently implemented Aztecs Read initiative, students in 6-8 grades in 2022-23 averaged 3.67 points of Rasch UnIT — or RIT — growth on the NWEA reading assessment, which accelerated to an average of 6.17 RIT points in 2024-25, the school reported.

    With about 370 students, Guadalupe Centers aims to serve as a hub for Kansas City’s Hispanic community, said Christopher Leavens, teacher and lead for English/language arts, who led the establishment of Aztecs Read as an initiative to put a library in every classroom along with various related initiatives such as author visits and an online reading log. A multipurpose room had served as a library—but without a staff librarian, possibly for the school’s entire history.

    “I’m an English teacher, and I believe so much in students being able to have good literature, and stories that speak to their culture,” said Leavens, who’s been teaching for 14 years and is in his fourth year at Guadalupe Centers. “Independent reading is so valuable in developing their reading and writing, and in developing who they are, as people — communications skills, empathy, connection. I felt it was important for me to build that up.”

    The initiative began during Leavens’ first year at the school, solely in his 7th grade classroom. But toward the end of the school year, he decided that the entire school, which has a total of nine classrooms devoted to students in various places along the English-language journey, should have a dedicated classroom library, and his colleagues, school leaders and the district stepped up to help. For those in the early stages of English language development, the books are in Spanish, but as they advance along the continuum, they move to English-language reading.

    “We built it out over time,” he said. “Beyond getting books in the kids’ hands, we’ve tried to build up a reading culture. … Our district has been incredibly supportive of us, financially, to invest in the classroom libraries and build it out.”

    Beyond the classroom libraries, Aztecs Read has hosted author visits — including with Pedro Martín, who wrote the graphic memoir “Mexikid.” 

    “He was able to come in, give a presentation, sign books and have lunch with our kids,” Leavens said.

    The program has also invested in the online reading log Beanstack, which enables students to track their reading progress. “It can provide more infrastructure, accountability and build out reading to the home and get parents involved,” he said.

    That tracking capability led to “Book of the Break” challenges, during which the school provides different tiers of incentives for students to read over school breaks for at least 10 minutes every day, Leavens said. Those who do enter a drawing for the grand prize, a pair of headphones; or the second prize, one of 10 gift cards to AMC Theatres, which were donated after a teacher reached out to the company.

    At the very least, students — who typically wear uniforms — get to enjoy a dress-down day, he said.

    “Not all kids are in homes where they have books, or reading role models,” Leavens said. “Getting kids to read is not always easy to do. … The team we have, too, is so resourceful and hard-working. We still have a lot of work to do, but we’ve been able to build up the amount these kids are reading for fun, and their enjoyment when they have read.”

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  • My Posts from Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop – Teaching in Higher Ed

    My Posts from Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop – Teaching in Higher Ed

    As part of participating in Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, we were given lessons and activities three times a week for six weeks. I had been blogging perhaps once or twice a year for a while now, never feeling like I had found my voice with those posts. Doing that much sharing via the written form seemed daunting, yet I had a strong suspicion that the discipline would pay off. I was not wrong at all on that front.

    Here are the various posts I wrote, along with an overview of the concepts explored in each one.

    01 – Getting Curious About Network Mapping

    Great insight lies in visualizing and analyzing the relationships that surround our work and learning. Networks are fundamental lenses for how we connect, influence, and grow.

    Key themes:

    • Network mapping and the difference between strong ties and weak ties (and how both kinds are essential to a thriving learning network).
    • The habit of giving first and nurturing relationships as network fuel.

    Quote:

    “Most intuitive notions of the “strength” of an interpersonal tie should be satisfied by the following definition: the strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” — Mark S. Granovetter (1973)

    Both strong and weak ties are vital to our learning.

    02 – Let’s Get Curious

    Allowing ourselves to wonder opens up our capacity to learn, connect, and co-create more deeply.

    Key themes:

    • Sparking curiosity means we tap into a power well beyond certainty (as illustrated so well through this beloved clip from Ted Lasso).
    • The world of work is increasingly complex; the very skills that matter now include creativity, imagination, empathy and curiosity.

    Quote:

    “The skills required to live in a world dominated by complex and non-routine work requires — creativity, imagination, empathy, and curiosity.” — Harold Jarche

    Stay curious, widen our lenses, and lean into the discomfort of not-knowing as the gateway to meaningful growth.

    03 – Connecting Birds, Grief, and Communities

    Grief, networks, and belonging are deeply intertwined in shaping the places where we learn, grow, and support one another.

    Key themes:

    • The isolation that grief can bring creates a powerful invitation to community when we’re willing to show up with vulnerably.
    • Communities (using Mastodon) and how we sustain communities when the baskets we placed our eggs in (platforms, networks) change or disappear and what that means for our learning ecosystems (I didn’t write about this in the post, but many say the answer is federated networks)

    Quote:

    “If we put our metaphorical eggs in one basket and something happens to that basket, there’s no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.” — Bonni Stachowiak

    Invest in communities that embrace complexity, invite connection across networks, and hold space for both loss and belonging.

    04 – Engaging with Intentionality and Curiosity

    As I reflected on intentionality this week, I realized that showing up with purpose—not just going through the motions—significantly shapes what I notice, how I respond, and who I become in the process.

    Key themes:

    • Intentionality helps clarify why something matters and helps resist the pull of the urgent and focus on the important.
    • Analyzing who Harold Jarche follows on Mastodon offered an opportunity to reflect on my aims for the network.

    Quote:

    “Show up for the work.” — Bonni Stachowiak

    Jarche also gave some examples of the practices on which PKM is built upon, such as narrating our work and sharing half-baked ideas.

    05 – Scooping Up Adulting and the Benefits of Being Curious

    Moving through life’s messy, liminal spaces requires curiosity, humility, and movement.

    Key themes:

    • The relevance of the Cynefin framework in helping us learn in the complex domain.
    • The value of formal and informal communities and open knowledge and formal knowledge networks as our learning ecology.
    • Curiosity as a pathway through liminality: staying attuned to what is becoming.

    Quote:

    “In a crisis it is important to act but even more important to learn as we take action.” — Harold Jarche

    This Learning in the Complex Domain post by Jarche is likely the most important one for me to revisit from all that I read throughout these six weeks, as I’m still struggling to understand the Cynefin framework.

    06 – Why Isn’t RSS More Popular By Now?

    It’s still wild to me that RSS isn’t as common as navigating websites.

    Key themes:

    • A well-curated set of feeds via an RSS aggregator turns passive reading into active sense-making.
    • RSS remains undervalued in the age of algorithmic feeds, yet when we control our own feed-ecosystem we reclaim agency over where our attention goes.

    Quote:

    However, I’m picky about my reading experience and have gotten particular about being able to read via Unread on my iPad and navigate everything with just one thumb. — Bonni Stachowiak

    I was also glad to learn from Jarche about subscribing to Mastodon feeds and hashtags via RSS, though I haven’t experimented with that much, yet, since the Tapestry app does a lot of that for me.

    07 – Can You Keep a Secret?

    Understanding the frameworks behind our media tools unlocks far deeper insights than simply reacting to what comes our way.

    Key themes:

    • Exploring Marshall McLuhan’s Media Tetrad helped me see every medium as doing four things: extending, retrieving, obsolescing, and reversing.
    • Applying the tetrad to the smartphone made visible how it extends access and connection, obsolesces older single-purpose devices, retrieves communal spaces, and reverses into distraction and isolation when pushed too far.
    • This kind of analysis invites me to pause, notice, and interrogate the media I use daily rather than assume they’re neutral or benign.

    Quote:

    “The reversals are already evident — corporate surveillance, online orthodoxy, life as reality TV, constant outrage to sell advertising. The tetrads give us a common framework to start addressing the effects of social media pushed to their limits. Once you see these effects, you cannot un-see them.” — Harold Jarche

    Analyzing these media tools heps us choose how to engage with them, rather than passively being shaped by them.

    08 – Fake News Brings Me to an Unusual Topic for this Blog

    It is critical to engage in ways to increase the likelihood of us being able to identify fake news. .

    Key themes:

    • The articulation of four primary types of fake news — propaganda, disinformation, conspiracy theory, and clickbait — as outlined by Harold Jarche.
    • How propaganda intentionally spreads ideas to influence or damage an opposing cause; disinformation deliberately plants falsehoods to obscure truth.
    • The persistence of conspiracy theories despite lacking evidence, and how clickbait uses sensationalism to manipulate attention and action.

    Quote:

    Misinformation implies that the problem is one of facts, and it’s never been a problem of facts. It’s a problem of people wanting to receive information that makes them feel comfortable and happy. – Renée DiResta, as quoted in El País

    Our identities get so wrapped up in what we believe, it can be so challenging to consider how we might be part of combating fake news in our various contexts.

    09 – From Half-Baked to Well-Done: Building a Sensemaking Practice

    It can be so generative to share thoughts before they’re polished and this openness fuels learning, creativity, and connection.

    Key themes:

    • Half-baked ideas make space for iteration: they invite others in, rather than presenting a finished product that shuts conversation down.
    • Sharing early thinking helps me stay curious, flexible, and less attached to being “right.”
    • When we release ideas in progress, we give our networks something to build on, remix, or nudge in new directions.

    Quote:

    If you don’t make sense of the world for yourself, then you’re stuck with someone else’s world view. — Harold Jarche

    Let ideas be emergent rather than complete so that learning can unfold collaboratively.

    10 – The Experts in My Neighborhood

    Jarche introduces us to various PKM roles for this topic.

    Key themes:

    • Our learning ecosystems benefits from curating a diverse set of experts to help navigate complexity.
    • Through my PKMastery practices (bookmarking, sense-making, sharing), I can engage with expert ideas over time.
    • The real value comes not from one “expert,” but from a network of thinkers whose disagreements and different perspectives stretch our own thinking.

    Quote:

    “Writing every day is less about becoming someone who writes, and more about becoming someone who thinks.” — JA Westenberg

    The value of PKM is in curating many voices, cultivating a “neighborhood” of experts to follow, listen, question, and to build a rich, networked sensemaking practice rather than rely on single voices alone.

    11 – Network Weaving as an Antidote to Imposter Syndrome

    Turning toward connection can be one of our strongest antidotes to imposter syndrome.

    Key themes:

    • Network weaving reframes “Do I belong here?” to “Who can I bring together?” — shifting the energy from proving my worth to creating belonging.
    • Connecting people, ideas, and stories becomes my purpose: not to be the smartest person in the room, but to serve as a bridge, curator, and connector.
    • Vulnerability matters: acknowledging I don’t have all the answers, but inviting others to learn out loud anyway.

    Quote:

    A triangle exists between three people in a social network. An “open triangle” exists where one person knows two other people who are not yet connected to each other — X knows Y and X knows Z, but Y and Z do not know each other. A network weaver (X) may see an opportunity or possibility from making a connection between two currently unconnected people (Y and Z). A “closed triangle” exists when all three people know each other: X-Y, X-Z, Y-Z. – Valdis Krebs

    This reminder feels like fuel for the next leg of my PKMastery journey — leaning into weaving networks as practice not just for growth, but for belonging and shared strength.

    12 – I Can See Clearly Now The Frogs Are Here

    Growth often comes not from jumping to answers but from staying curious, experimenting, and traveling alongside fellow learners.

    Key themes:

    • Fellow seekers offer empathy, solidarity, and space to wrestle with ideas, often more supportively than experts alone.
    • As described by Harold Jarche, combining curiosity with connection can help transform seekers into knowledge catalysts, nodes in our networks who learn, curate, and contribute meaningfully.
    • Innovation and insight often emerge through playful experiments (half-baked ideas) from the beginner’s mind held by seekers.

    Quote:

    Your fellow seekers can help you on a journey to become a Knowledge Catalyst, which takes parts of the Expert and the Connector and combines them to be a highly contributing node in a knowledge network. We can become knowledge catalysts — filtering, curating, thinking, and doing — in conjunction with others. Only in collaboration with others will we understand complex issues and create new ways of addressing them. As expertise is getting eroded in many fields, innovation across disciplines is increasing. We need to reach across these disciplines. — Harold Jarche

    Seeking is not a sign of weakness, but as a source of collective curiosity, connection, and growth.

    13 – What Happens When We Start Making the Work Visible

    There is strength in making invisible processes and decisions visible.

    Key themes:

    • When we narrate our work, we open up pathways for real-time collaboration and shared learning rather than one-way transmission.
    • Narration allows for experimentation: sharing work in progress de-commodifies knowledge.
    • It shifts the emphasis from polished deliverables to ongoing learning — not just focusing on the final product, but how we got there, and what we learned along the way.

    Quote:

    The key is to narrate your work so it is shareable, but to use discernment in sharing with others. Also, to be good at narrating your work, you have to practice. — Harold Jarche

    Narrating our work offers a window into our process of learning.

    14 – No Frogs Were Actually Harmed in Describing Systems Thinking

    As I reflected on systems thinking, I found myself returning to how challenging (and how necessary) it is to see beyond events and into the structures that shape them. Revisiting Senge’s The Fifth Discipline reminded me just how often we can slip into reacting instead of zooming out to notice patterns.

    Key themes:

    • How easy it is to fall into organizational “learning disabilities,” like assuming I am my position rather than part of a larger whole.
    • Chris Argyris describes the phenomenon of “skilled incompetence,” where groups of individuals who get super good at making sure to prevent themselves from actually learning.
    • The invitation to practice systems thinking collectively, not just individually.

    Quote:

    You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. – Peter Senge

    Sitting with this reminded me that lest we fall victim to skilled incompetence, we need to continually nurture the humility and curiosity to keep looking wider, deeper, and more generously at the forces shaping our organizations and our work.

    15 – Asking as a Way of Knowing: PKM Embodied By Bryan Alexander

    The potential for adding value through PKM helps make our contributions much richer when paired with curiosity, generosity, and intentional sharing.

    Key themes:

    • PKM isn’t just about what I read or bookmark — it’s about how I transform that input through asking questions, sense-making, and offering what I learn into shared spaces.
    • Public sharing (through podcasting, writing, conversation) complements private learning — the two together deepen meaning and foster connection.
    • “Adding value” can look like holding space for others’ learning — asking curious questions, offering resources, and modeling openness rather than trying to prove expertise.

    Quotes:

    Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the asker seem foolish or childish — rather, to ask is to command the respect of the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, _likes you better_ and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his knowledge with you. — Maria Popova

    It was great getting to see this all in action, through a dinnertime conversation with Bryan Alexander.

    16 – The Gap

    Fear and self-doubt often keeps us from beginning and from recognizing how much value we hold even before we “arrive.”

    Key themes:

    • There’s often a gap between where we are now and where we want to be — but that gap doesn’t diminish the worth of what we’re already learning and creating.
    • True learning requires embracing vulnerability: pursuing new practices.
    • Public sharing matters: showing work in progress reminds me (and others) that learning is ongoing and that we don’t need to wait until we’re “expert enough” to contribute something meaningful.

    Quote:

    “The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.” — Tim Kastelle

    Commit to practice, to sharing, and to staying open to becoming someone who learns out loud.

    17 – Walking With PKM: Reflections From Six Weeks of Practice

    Stepping away from busyness — even just to wander — creates the space for real insight and creative thinking.

    Key themes:

    • Walking becomes a practice of reflection: giving my brain space to wander and surface ideas.
    • Learning isn’t always quantifiable.
    • The value in a consistent PKM practice allows me to my own capacity to notice, wonder, and ultimately learn.

    Quote:

    Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness. — Harold Jarche

    PKM is part discipline, part letting go of the busyness, and part listening to whatever emerges.

    18 – The Last Step Toward the First Step

    “Mastery” is not an endpoint, but a habitual practice of learning, sharing, and growing.

    Key themes:

    • Value lies not in perfection, but in consistency: the small acts of sharing half-baked ideas and imperfect work.
    • What I do contributes to a larger learning ecosystem: by sharing what I learn, I contribute to collective sense-making and encourage others to do the same.

    Quote:

    It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other. — Ronald Burt

    The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.

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  • Most Americans Believe in the Effectiveness of Childhood Vaccines — But There’s a Catch – The 74

    Most Americans Believe in the Effectiveness of Childhood Vaccines — But There’s a Catch – The 74


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    This story was originally reported by Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th. Meet Barbara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

    Although a majority of Americans are confident that childhood vaccines are highly effective against serious illness, Republicans’ trust in vaccine safety and support of school requirements is dropping, according to new polling from Pew Research Center.

    Sixty-three percent of Americans are extremely or very confident in the effectiveness of childhood vaccines, according to a survey published Tuesday. But Democrats and those who lean Democrat are much more likely than Republicans and Republican-leaners to hold that view — 80 percent versus 48 percent.

    And while the majority of Americans believe in the safety of vaccines — 53 percent believe childhood vaccines have been tested enough for safety and 51 percent agree that the childhood vaccine schedule is safe — there is significantly more uncertainty among Republicans. For Democrats, 74 percent show high confidence in the safety testing of vaccines and 71 percent believe the childhood vaccine schedule is safe. For Republicans, those numbers are 35 percent and 32 percent, respectively.

    “Both things can be true, that people believe in vaccines’ effectiveness overall and the confidence is a little softer on safety,” said Eileen Yam, director of science and society research at Pew who was part of the primary research team. “But writ large, that’s been pretty stable to see confidence in vaccines. But at the same time, when it comes to things like school requirements, or ‘telling me what to do,’ or requiring me to do something — that’s where you see the bristling on the Republican side.”

    Americans have become more skeptical of requiring that children get the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to attend public school. Sixty-nine percent support it, a decline from 82 percent in 2016. Most of the drop can be attributed to Republicans — with just 52 percent believing in the requirement, compared to 79 percent in 2016. For Democrats, that support was 83 percent in 2016 and actually climbed to 86 percent this year.

    This all comes amid a major measles outbreak in the United States that started in Texas and has spread to multiple other states. And while students are required in each state to get the MMR vaccine to attend public school, officials in Florida have indicated a willingness to drop that requirement.

    Pew found broad and consistent support for the MMR vaccine: 84 percent believe its benefits outweigh its risks (of which there are minor side effects). When Pew first started asking about this in 2016, support was at 88 percent. Yam said the findings show some agreement on the benefits of the MMR vaccine. While 92 percent of Democrats believe the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks, 78 percent of Republicans do, too.

    Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who has revamped a key panel that helps decide vaccine policy, has questioned the safety of the MMR vaccine without evidence. He has the backing of President Donald Trump, who has perpetuated misinformation this year about childhood vaccines.

    Pew surveyed parents and found a majority with minor children (57 percent) say they are extremely or very confident in childhood vaccines’ effectiveness. Republican parents are far less likely than Democratic parents to have that confidence (45 percent versus 71 percent), belief in safety testing (29 percent versus 63 percent) and the childhood vaccine schedule (27 percent versus 58 percent).

    Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say medical scientists should have a major role in decisions about childhood vaccines (85 percent vs. 62 percent). There are more partisan fissures on the role of parents: 71 percent of Republicans say that parents of young children should have a major role in policy decisions about childhood vaccines. For Democrats, it’s 46 percent.

    “That speaks to just a divergence in trust in science that we’ve been tracking since before the pandemic,” Yam said. “Just Republicans since the pandemic, their confidence in scientists, the way they look at the CDC has just dropped off much more than on the Democrat side. Democrats have had fairly stable views on scientists and on the CDC, in contrast to Republicans.”

    Pew also examined how recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations have influenced Americans’ decisions around getting a COVID-19 shot. The agency recently agreed with Kennedy’s new vaccine panel to stop recommending the shot to everyone and to instead leave the choice up to people. Forty-four percent say they have heard nothing at all about the CDC’s changes to recommendations. Among those who have heard at least a little, 63 percent say it has had no influence on whether they got an updated vaccine.

    “The one big takeaway there is that policies really can’t influence behaviors if people haven’t heard about the policies or the recommendations,” Yam said. “And in this case, a lot of people haven’t heard about it, and some when they have, their minds were made up. They’ve already kind of decided, and it really didn’t influence their behavior one way or the other.”

    This story was originally published on The 19th.


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  • Budget 2025 for universities and students

    Budget 2025 for universities and students

    There’s not generally a lot for higher education in the chancellor of the exchequer’s annual budget statement – but this year marks an exception.

    We were expecting further details of two policies first announced earlier this year – a levy on international student fee income, and the promised return of maintenance grants for students from deprived backgrounds studying priority subjects.

    Though the return of grants (even in a very limited form) was welcomed by students and the sector, the levy has been the focus of sustained lobbying from providers struggling to balance their books with the one area of income that has sustainably grown over recent years.

    The budget also provides a few other unwelcome surprises – thresholds and interest rates have been frozen for plan 2 loan repayments (those made by the majority of recent graduates) until 2029-30, meaning that graduates will pay more. A tweak to pension salary sacrifices may make it even more expensive for some providers to employ staff. And the looming threat of a mammoth schools SEND debt being covered by departmental expenditure means that every area of education spending is likely to face pressure from 2027-28.

    But it is the fee uplift for the next two years that is likely to get most attention.

    Fee uplift

    The higher rate for tuition fee loan caps will rise, as announced, in both of the next two academic years – to £9,790 a year in 2026-27 and up to £10,050 for 2027-28, with other statutory caps (including for classroom-based foundation years) rising in lockstep. These are expected to be the final two rises that apply to all providers – primary legislation will be laid that means future fee cap rises will be linked to the Office for Students’ revised teaching excellence framework.

    It should also be noted that these are per year amounts, not the per credit amounts that the (as-yet unenacted) Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Act allows the government to set – this is interesting as the entire funding system is due to move to a per credit basis (to allow for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement’s modular approach to study) from 2026.

    While this decision has been widely trailed by the minister as evidence of her department addressing the financial problems faced by universities, it should be noted that both increases are (as usual) by OBR projections of interest rates which may differ from the actual interest rates. The rise of what is widely seen as the default tuition fee to north of £10,000 in 2027-28 is likely to trigger widespread commentary – if you believe the stories from the coalition years the original £9,000 figure was chosen precisely to avoid being above what was seen as a psychologically important £10,000 sticker price.

    Here’s how that breaks down for all of the common fee caps:

    Fee caps 2025-26 2026-27 2027-28
    With TEF and APP (FT) £9,535 £9,790 £10,050
    With TEF and APP (PT) £7,145 £7,335 £7,530
    With TEF and APP (Accel) £11,440 £11,750 £12,060
    With APP only (FT) £9,275 £9,525 £9,780
    With TEF only (FT £6,355 £6,525 £6,695
    With neither TEF nor APP (FT) £6,185 £6,350 £6,520

    International student levy

    We were expecting details of the international fee levy first announced in the immigration white paper – and these arrived via a consultation with a closing date of 18 February 2026.

    The proposal is that from August 2028, the levy on international student fee income has been set at a flat rate of £925 per student (rising by inflation in following years), with the first 220 students entirely exempt. It is estimated that this will generate around £445m in 2028-29, equivalent to around 4.5 per cent of total international fee income across the sector. However DfE estimates that the sector would lose £270m for that year (equivalent to around 3 per cent of international fee income), suggesting that more than half of the cost of the levy would be passed on to students, given that the same estimates suggest 14,000 less students would come to the UK to study in that year.

    Importantly, “international students” are defined as those who are registered for study during the year in question (excepting those who leave during the contractually protected first two weeks of study). Transnational provision, and provision at further education colleges below level 3, will not be in scope. And the system will be run by the Office for Students – there’s even an option to pay the levy quarterly by direct debit.

    The impact analysis notes that the levy will – unsurprisingly – reduce the ability of the sector to cross subsidise domestic teaching or research from international fee, but we are reminded that this is before accounting for any reinvestment of the levy in the sector, and before accounting for the rise in domestic tuition fees (though as fee rises are linked, nominally at least, to inflation that last one is a little disingenuous.

    The effect of a flat fee, as opposed to the blanket 6 per cent of international fee income levy first proposed in the annex to the immigration white paper, is to decrease the impact on providers who are able to charge higher fees per student. The “free” 220 students will keep many smaller specialist providers out of the levy entirely, meaning that proportionally more costs will fall on providers who attract large numbers of international students with lower fees.

     

    [Full screen]

    While the University of Suffolk will lose nearly 14 per cent of international fee income to the levy(on 750 students) and the University of Huddersfield will lose 9.3 per cent, the University of Cambridge will lose just 2.69 per cent (on 7,315 students). The practical impact of the proposal will be that providers that are more likely to be drawing substantial parts of their operating income from international fees (and those more likely to be enrolling students with disadvantaged backgrounds) will be hit hardest. The charts in this article will help you compare this outcome with proportional models like the initial 6 per cent proposal.

    We are not given a rationale for this change of approach, but it is fair to assume an active policy decision – to minimise the impact on those that make the most from international fees – based on soft power and international standing. It is a form of specialisation, perhaps.

    Maintenance grants

    Pretty much confirming that the policy on maintenance loans was back-of-a-fag-packet for Conference stuff, the documents collectively hide how much of the levy will be spent on the new maintenance grants. What we do know is that they’re coming in 2028-29, will be available to both new students and those already studying, and will be paid on top of maintenance loans.

    The amounts will be means-tested – students from households earning at or below £25,000 will get the maximum (£1,000 in years one and two, £750 from year three onwards), tapering to £500/£375 for those with household incomes up to £30,000. The higher amounts in early years are designed to help with “access and initial progression”, but in reality it’s a cliff edge that hits students from care-experienced backgrounds particularly hard.

    That doesn’t give us a total – grants will only be available for certain subjects aligned with the government’s economic priorities and Industrial Strategy. How many students there are left on a residual household income of 25k or less by 2018 is also not outlined. The eligible subject list hasn’t been confirmed – it’ll be informed by Skills England’s work on skills needs and may align with LLE priority funding categories. And students will need to be studying at least 120 credits per year (or full-time under current arrangements) to be eligible.

    Maintenance loans

    As (maximum) UG fees rise by projected inflation, so does maximum maintenance (and the PG loan schemes) by the OBR projection for Q1 2027 of 2.7 per cent. Of course the OBR has been wrong before, and may be wrong again – this year’s 3.1 per cent increase (based on Q1 2026) now shows up as 4.1 per cent in revised OBR forecasts, an error that nobody goes on to fix and so compounds in its impact over time.

    In addition, there’s no sign of that parental (residual household) income threshold for parents chipping in changing either – and now that the minimum wage is firmly over £25,000, will almost certainly mean a collapse off a cliff in the number of students able to access the maximum. This year DfE’s own estimates reckon that a maximum loan increase of 3.1 per cent will only result in an average loan increase of 2.6 per cent – expect (much) more of that by the end of the Parliament.

    While we’re on parental contributions, buried in the documents is another nasty sting. Right now, if you have two kids at university at the same time, the system recognises that your money has to stretch, and works out a “parental contribution” based on your household income, then splits that between the two students. So if the calculation says “this family can afford to put in £2,000”, and you have two undergrads, the system assumes roughly £1,000 per child – and each student’s maintenance loan is a bit higher to reflect that you are not magically doubling your contribution.

    It turns out that the LLE change will mean the SLC stops doing that split for people on the new LLE-style maintenance – each young person’s maintenance will be worked out on the household income as if they were the only one studying. So using the same example, the system would effectively assume you can contribute £2,000 to Child A and £2,000 to Child B. It’s “simpler” because in a modular, on-off, part-time LLE world the SLC will no longer have to track who else in the family is studying and constantly recalculate the split.

    But for a “traditional” family with two young full-time undergrads at the same time, it quietly removes a small protection you currently get when more than one child is in higher education.

    Plan 2 threshold freeze

    You might remember, back in the Summer of 2023, when Bridget Phillipson was touring the studios to declare that graduates will pay less under a Labour government:

    Reworking the present system gives scope for a month-on-month tax cut for graduates, putting money back in people’s pockets when they most need it. For young graduates this will give them breathing space at the start of their working lives and as they bring up families. This is a choice that the Tories could be making now to deliver a better, fairer system for our graduates and for our universities…. Labour will not be increasing government spending on this.

    There was never a detailed explanation of how that magic trick would be pulled off – although it was likely to have been based on London Economics’ stepped repayment modelling, which depended in part on the reintroduction of real interest rates post-graduation (between 0 per cent and 2 per cent) for graduates with earnings between £27,571 and £57,570.

    Either way – at least for Plan 2 borrowers – the budget very much breaks that pledge. For anyone who started a degree between 2012 and 2022, the repayment threshold will be frozen at £29,385 in cash terms for three years from April 2027. Instead of that threshold rising with prices or earnings, it just sits there while wages (hopefully) go up – which means more graduates crossing the line into repayment sooner, and those already repaying handing over a bigger slice of their real income than they would have done otherwise.

    It’s very much a stealth extra tax on graduates layered on top of already frozen income tax and National Insurance thresholds, and it shifts (even) more of the cost of the system away from the state and onto a cohort who have already endured one round of threshold suppression under Michelle Donelan’s “fairer sharing of the burden” reforms, have watched the “deal” they signed up to being repeatedly tweaked after the fact, and had been led to expect a “month-on-month tax cut” rather than another quiet squeeze.

    The Treasury’s justification consciously echoes Donelan’s line about graduate earnings premiums and fairness to non-graduates, but in practice this looks less like a principled reset of student finance and more like a return to the same playbook – using Plan 2 borrowers as a handy, captive tax base until the reality shows up on their payslips. For Reeves, it generates £285m in 2025-26, a big £5,915m “gain” in 2026-27 (that’s mainly the accounting revaluation of the loan book, not cash), then £255m in 2027-28, £290m in 2028-29, £355m in 2029-30 and £380m in 2030-31.

    Wider measures for students

    Rising National Living Wage and youth rates mean a substantial chunk of full-time students working in hospitality, retail and care will see higher hourly pay, although given the volume of jobs lost in these sectors in recent years (with similar warnings from those industries overnight), they’ll need to find a job first.

    The creation of a “Fair Work Agency” with explicit focus on enforcement in “high-risk” sectors is also, if successful, is likely to impact on international student incomes in a way that few like to talk about, but pretty much everybody knows (working more than 20 hours a week, cash in hand, with no rights).

    Extending the £3 bus fare cap will help, holding prescription charges steady all keep day-to-day pressure in shared student houses and commuter budgets a little lower than it would otherwise be, and taking around £150 off the average energy bill by shifting decarbonisation costs off bills and onto general spending won’t matter much given “all-inclusive” bills in halls and HMOs.

    Free emergency contraception in pharmacies closes an obvious gap in sexual health provision for a very student-heavy age group, while the cap on ticket resale prices cuts straight across the live events market some students use.

    Add all the measures up, and you might expect student poverty to show up in the annual release of the distributional impact on households analysis that gets produced to accompany budget day – but alas it remains the case that tuition fee loans show up as household income in the DWP’s Households below average income (HBAI) statistics, which means that the increase in maximum fees will see an HMO with 5 students in it looking 50k better off than they really are.

    Other bits

    The chancellor capped national insurance contribution exemptions for salary sacrifice into pensions at £2,000 – employees who pay more than this amount each year into pensions will need to account for employer national insurance contributions on additional amounts. A note from sector employers association UCEA before the budget reminded the Treasury that this approach is widely used by universities, and calculated that a cap could cost individual USS institutions an additional £1-3m each year with a total cost to the sector north of £50m – and there are going to be impacts relating to other pension schemes too.

    One of the biggest current issues with the wider education budget, and one that has pushed many local councils towards bankruptcy, is the rapidly rising cost of school provision and other support for pupils with special educational needs (SEND). Currently the costs of this provision are nominally covered by local councils, but are subject to a statutory override which means that the sums involved are not included within council deficit calculations. The budget confirms the June announcement that this arrangement will end from 2027-28, with costs (due to hit around £5bn) covered from that point within departmental expenditure limits.

    This has a clear impact on other areas of government spending, and if the Department for Education is to be made responsible it is likely that at least some of this funding will have to be found via cuts to other budgets, including for tertiary education.

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