Thursday 18-05-2023 - 12:35

This year the University announced a shocking increase of 10.3% to college accommodation fees. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about what underpins this issue and what it’s broader impacts are. As well as the face value of making colleges more expensive for new students and returners, the University need to recognise the impact raises like this will have on the private rented sector in Durham City and the potential cultural impact this can have on the University. I’d like to give a more detailed explanation of how I feel Durham’s got to this state, and what kind of institutional change of approach is needed to fix the situation. 

The maintenance loan problem

Durham University has a very high-cost base, which is impacted heavily by inflation. By raising the cost by 10.3% when inflation is currently 14% its likely the University will be continuing to effectively subsidise their accommodation, leaving them with less money to spend on other aspects of education. What the University need to properly acknowledge though, is that students funding rises by even less than inflation. There’s a creeping error in the maintenance loan system for home students – which has led to a pitiful increase of just 2.8%. Despite all this, the government continue to stick with their aim of ensuring “that students do not suffer a real reduction in their income”. However, in the Department for Educations own equality analysis, it’s noted that the change will “not provide any catch up of the real terms losses already seen by students”, could “lead to a further erosion of students’ purchasing power depending on future inflation” and will “negatively impact all students”.  

Another major flaw in the maintenance loan system is that while the amount of the loan increases, the thresholds on the bands do not – a family earning £27,000 now has far less money to contribute towards their student than a family on £27,000 in 2003 would have been able to contribute. 

The limits of the Durham Grant

This is why when working on the Durham Grant Scheme this year, we decided to also ask the University to change the threshold for the maximum amount, so from next year every student with a household income of £30,000 or less will receive the maximum amount. However, at a time of cost-of-living crisis it’s increasingly clear that a system with high rent and increased grants is completely unsustainable, and the grant scheme can’t even begin to paper over the massive cracks in the student funding gap. Durham would effectively need to be giving 80% of students a grant at this rate to allow them to afford a Durham education. Small subsidies achieved by raising the price by 4% less than inflation clearly aren’t going to cut it when everything else is getting more expensive and students purchasing power is likely to be further eroded.  

The fundamental strategy around college accommodation pricing is flawed. Instead of management deciding what they want in each college and then look at how much it would cost after inflation, the process needs to start by looking at how much students can afford, and then what they can get with that money. They need to write the budget before the shopping list, so students aren’t left holding bills they can’t pay.

What costs and what matters

As inflation continues to affect fuel and energy prices, and our lowest paid staff desperately need a pay rise, we’re also likely to see an increase in the disparity between catered and self-catered colleges, with the difference this year going up to £2760. If Durham isn’t careful about how this is managed, there’s a real danger that in a few years we see a return to the worst of the Hill – Bailey divide.  

The other assumptions that need challenging are ones about what students actually want from their accommodation. As one of the few Universities in the country to not offer optional catering packages as standard, its remarkable that this isn’t considered more. Whilst there seems to be some satisfaction from the management that very few students who apply for self-catered colleges were reallocated to catered ones, there’s no evidence collected on the needs of a student wanting to return to college accommodation. Someone who signed up to a catered college in their first year, and wanting to return in the 4th year of an integrated masters may feel that as a 22 year old they’d rather not pay for the 21 hot meals, but rather have a reduced package of 12 or 17 meals. It also assumes that the only reason someone would apply to a catered college is because they want three hot meals a day, seven days a week, when in reality we know that many students aren’t eating all these meals, and a college community is far more than a roof, a bed and sometimes catering. 

Durham’s missing students

We can analyse data set after data set of students who are here and talk to Durham students, but what's hard to quantify to the people setting the fees is the impact of the cost of attendance on potential Durham students. We know that students from lower income backgrounds are often put off by the high ticket price of accommodation – when looking at the fees they don’t read £9000 and think of the Durham Grant as off-set against this, and are fully aware the cost of attendance encompasses much more than just the rent. Despite the work on Widening Access and Participation  I’m still left talking to students from other institutions who give the same story “Oh Durham! So pretty! Yeah I really wanted to go there, but the rent …". Other universities offer students cheaper accommodation, and for many students, that means Durham is a less desirable place to study. Until the University can unpick this challenge, our other work on access and participation, while valuable, is simply papering over the cracks.