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Browne - What it means for OCA students - The Open College of the Arts

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Browne – What it means for OCA students

UK based OCA students will have found it difficult to miss the publication yesterday of the Browne Report (Or more formally the report of The Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance ). The press coverage of the report has majored on the likelihood that fees for full time study at Universities in England could double from £3,290 a year to £7,000 or more. Inevitably this has led to concern amongst OCA students that their fees could rise by similar amounts. A number of students have already rung seeking reassurance that this will not be the case.
This post is intended to provide that reassurance. In order to do that I have first to explain how Universities are currently funded and how this differs from the way OCA is funded. In English Universities offering attendance based full-time courses the Government pays the institution a grant through the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) a teaching grant to which they add the student income – i.e. the money coming from fees. The teaching grant far outweighs the student income and is needed to cover the very heavy overheads borne by the University. Although the Government’s position on HEFCE funding is not yet known, Lord Browne was encouraged to work on the assumption that the grant would be cut significantly. His task was to come up with a system of funding that allowed English universities to continue to be amongst the best in the world with far less public funding. And that is what he has done, he assumes that in absence of public funding students will pick up a larger bill.
The OCA as an educational charity works on an entirely different model, we do not receive a teaching grant and are able to charge the fees we do because we have engineered out many of the costs of traditional HE. For example we do not have an extensive estate to maintain – anyone who has visited our Head Office will understand that our head quarters, in the former surface offices of the Redbrook Colliery are far from palatial. And quite right too. Another way we differ is that the assumptions about what is provided by the institution and what is provided by the student are quite different; we can’t lend you the College’s Hasselblad H4D-60 for your project as we don’t have one. Then again, it is questionable if you really need one (Sorry Calumet)
We do get some money from HEFCE. We get it indirectly from Bucks New University and it is paid for students who are successfully assessed. This year we expect this funding to be about 17.5% of our turnover. If this funding disappeared, and we accept that it might, we might  have to put our fees up significantly. But fees would not have to double, nothing like.  I say might have to put our fees up, because that assumes everything else stays the same. Currently the fee cost of studying with the OCA  (£4565 if you pay for each course individually) is 46% of the traditional full time HE cost, but would fall to only 22% if the traditional approach was to cost £7000 a year. My economist’s training tells me more people would want to study with the OCA, meaning our relatively small overheads could be shared across more students.
So while I cannot rule out fee increases in the future, I do not think there is any reason for students to be concerned at this stage. Two final points. You might be interested to know that enrolments are already growing rapidly (up 25% this academic year compared to last year), which is very pleasing. Secondly, if we do need to change the fee structure it will certainly not be before June 2011 and by that time the Student Association will be in place and any changes will be following consultation with that body.
Gareth Dent
Chief Executive OCA
13 October 2010


Posted by author: Genevieve Sioka

6 thoughts on “Browne – What it means for OCA students

  • £7,000 a year… Over £20,000 in debt by the time you finish your degree… Welcome a new generation of young debtors in their early 20’s, stressed-out newcomers to the job market. Sounds pretty insane to me. The question is, will students get their money’s worth from attendance-based universities? Students will demand smaller classes, availability of tutors for on-going consultation, quality feedback delivered timely, more personal attention, etc… In other words, everything that most students are not currently getting. I can see hordes of hard-up students defecting traditional HE education and switching to distance learning because it offers value for money.

  • Thanks for the reassurances, but there really are no guarantees, are there? The Open University is jubilant (well, those in ‘power’, apparently) that it has won the long battle to get part-time degree students on a par with full-time ones. But some people feel that full-time students are being given a very raw deal indeed, and that for part-timers this is no victory at all. The plan is to take HE funding out of the state altogether. I cannot see how your institution can escape the fallout from this radical redesign of HE funding, despite your modest accommodation overheads (thanks for mentioning that). One of my children was about to enrol on your degree programme, but now we don’t know what to advise.

  • Hi Suzanne
    I am intrigued by your comment. You are absolutely right that Browne is based on an assumption that the state is going to be putting far less into HE than before, and indeed far less than most people could previously imagined. I hoped my post would reassure by showing how little dependence the OCA has on state funding already and give people confidence that our fees were not going to sky rocket.
    As to my personal views on whether these changes are positive for society, that’s entirely a different matter.
    Gareth

  • I do not feel that new OCA students need to worry. I have been
    with OCA since 2008 and have found them great. There is nothing
    better than putting money into a degree and education no matter
    what the cost. I know the amount seems excessive but what you rather an education for a possible career or a new pair of trainers?

  • Thanks for the reassurance Gareth it is good that some people are keeping a cool head in such uncertain times. I have to sing the OCA’s praises, a charity whose ethos is to make art accessible to eveyone and that is exactly what it does. I have had a second chance at education because of OCA, the only college to offer practical art courses through distance learning and at a fraction of the cost of full time HE. They have worked hard to get funding available through grants and because of their efficient bussiness model can now try to keep the impact of politics on our fees to a minimum. Keep up the good work I and I’m sure lots of others appreciate what you do.

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