Alexander Du Lifu was the last priest of a small group of Albasians Chinese Orthodox who according to

Alexander Du Lifu was the last priest of a small group of Albasians, Chinese Orthodox who, according to tradition, are descendants of five Russian soldiers who survived a war between Russia and China in the 1680s. “My gut feeling is that we’re being forced to charge at or near the maximum for all or most of our courses,” says Mike Goldstein, Coventry’s vice-chancellor. The changes may well be in students’ interests – higher fees should mean a better education – but these are desperately uncertain times for the new universities.l.hodges independent.co.uk. It wants to find out whether students be deterred from applying for courses with discounted fees. One option he is examining is not charging top-up fees at all The other is to charge a top-up fee for every subject.

Professor McVicar is against charging a top-up only for some subjects. And like UEL his university is against the idea of a marketplace in higher education.Coventry University has commissioned research into what improvements students would like for their top-up fee. So, a bigger proportion of its top-up fee income can be ploughed back into improving education at a institution that already excels “This is unfair,” says Professor Thorne. “It is Labour’s ‘prole’ tax.”Another university that has not yet decided whether to charge a top-up fee is Central Lancashire, which has been a running focus groups to try to find out how students will react. “We don’t know what our students would do with income-contingent repayments,” says Malcolm McVicar, the vice-chancellor. The vice-chancellor estimates that its bursary bill will be more than £5m. Contrast that with the money that Cambridge will have to find for bursaries.

Because it has many fewer working-class students it will have a smaller bill. “We would be dropping some subjects and changing the students to whom we would reach out.”Because 41 per cent of the university’s students are working class, the second highest in the country after the University of Wolverhampton, UEL will have to spend a great deal of money in bursaries if it is going to charge top-up fees. It would simply mean the university would redouble its efforts to recruit overseas students “The character of our university would change,” he says. “An institution could have gone bust by then,” he says.UEL has not yet decided whether to charge the maximum fee of £3,000, but it has developed four scenarios for the future.