UK students’ subjective experiences and responses to higher education austerity: implications and lessons for the future

The 2010 UK Coalition government published The Coalition: our programme for government, which outlined ‘deficit reduction’ as the main priority for the Coalition’s fixed 5 years of governance. The significance of this became apparent through the austerity measures in public expenditure and specifically social policy expenditure. However, it is young people for whom austerity has had the most deleterious effects as a consequence of a number of policy changes, the most emblematic of which was the package of changes made in 2011 to undergraduate higher education funding. These changes included a tripling of undergraduate higher education (UHE) tuition fees paid by students from €3, 809 to € 11, 429 per year, and an increase in means tested repayable maintenance loans of up to €6,982 for those living outside London. The government rationalised these changes as a way to pay for the increasing UHE student population, a trend that is occurring in many European countries, including France which has a specific target to increase higher education attainment to 50% for 30-34 year olds by 2020. As a consequence of these significant changes, the estimate of debt from the Institute for Fiscal Studies for students leaving UHE following these changes is over €55,859, which is nearly €25,387 more than before the change (Crawford and Jin 2014). This empirical qualitative study aims to explore the ways in which UHE students in the UK have been affected by these policy measures. The study analyses students’ subjective experiences and responses to the UHE funding policy changes, and highlights in particular that these austerity policy changes to UHE student financing is impacting on younger generation in a way that has the potential to destabilize their personal and professional lives now and in the future. In the context of projected increases in UHE numbers across Europe, the study discusses what the implications of these changes might be for students in other European countries who may be affected by similar austerity measures.