Graduate doctors dread deep cuts

Graduates wanting to study medicine as a career change from 2012 are facing a possible sevenfold increase in the upfront tuition fees required, prompting warnings of course closures.

According to a document seen by Times Higher Education, the government is "unlikely" to be able to continue funding a scheme under which the NHS covers the majority of tuition fees for medical students on accelerated graduate courses. Funding for the later years of undergraduate programmes may also come under threat.

Currently, about 10 per cent of medicine students are on four-year graduate-entry courses, which are run at 16 of the UK's 31 medical schools. The courses are intended to widen access to the profession.

The students, who are not entitled to state-financed fee loans, must pay for the first year of their tuition - £3,375 in 2011-12. The Department of Health pays for the following years through the NHS Bursary Scheme.

However, with fees increasing to about £9,000 from 2012-13, there is now uncertainty about whether the government will be willing to cover the extra cost.

A briefing note prepared for a cross-departmental strategy group on health and education, seen by THE, estimates that the additional cost of higher fees for all medical degrees, including undergraduates, would be about £60 million a year.

It states that this represents a threefold increase in NHS funding for medicine and dentistry courses, and warns that the Department of Health "cannot afford to take this increased pressure without serious implications to other parts of the education and training budget".

If students have to meet the shortfall - almost £6,000 for years two to four in addition to the £9,000 year one cost - it would equate to a graduate-entry course costing about £26,000 upfront.

Will Seligman, a University of Oxford medicine undergraduate who chairs a committee on student finance at the British Medical Association, said there was real risk that graduate-entry courses would have to close.

"The graduate route will cease to exist if nothing is done about it," he said, adding that BMA research indicated that graduate-entry courses had a higher proportion of students from lower socio-economic groups compared with undergraduate courses.

He said he understood that the Department of Health and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills were in talks on the issue, but said a decision was now urgent as prospective students had only a few months before the application deadline for 2012 courses.

Grumpy Biomed: Funding for graduates: a last minute reprieve?

It's no secret that I have nothing but contempt for the government, not least due to their short-sighted and damaging plans for higher education and the NHS. The New Labour lot before them weren't much better, and indeed they were the ones who commissioned the Browne Report to begin with, but the Coalition has been a complete shambles, not least because it's an unholy marriage between a group of supposedly liberal and progressive individuals (the Lib Dems, believe it or not) and the firmly pro-business and pro-profit Conservative party. I am not a Lib Dem, though in between feeling cynically amused at their plight, I actually feel sorry for them, as they're acting as the Tory's human shields and the opinion polls prove it. Is Clegg the most hated man in Britain or what? But then again they brought this on themselves, which is a lesson to all would-be political opportunists... Until 2012, if a graduate started medical school, they would pay the tuition fees for their first year (£3000~) themselves. Graduates would not be entitled to a tution fee loan, but instead their fees for years 2-4 would be paid for by a NHS bursary. The graduate would also be able to get student loans to cover their cost of living for their four years at university. However, since the Coalition pushed through their "reforms" in 2010 at breakneck speed, they forgot to take into account the situation of post-2011 graduate entry medics. What happened next was over six months of pure uncertainty and misinformation, as it was suggested that the government wouldn't help GEM students, and that the NHS bursary would not be increased to cover the difference between the new £9K fees and the old £3K fees and no tuition fee loan would be provided. As you can imagine this lead to a lot of panic amongst many students about where they would be able to find £9K x 4, and that's just the tuition fees. With the living expenses of going to a central London medical school, I had figured that if I got an offer, I would need about £76K to actually get through the course. Since my parents aren't oil tycoons, I couldn't rely on them, and I was very reluctant to get a commercial bank loan. The Times Higher Education Supplement covered this story last week, the comments at the bottom of the article are an indication of how graduates felt about being shafted by the government, simply for wanting to study medicine.

Essential Guide to Paying for University

The Insiders' Guide to UK Medical Schools 2007 - 2008

Student Survival

Postgraduate UK study and funding guide

Net that course!, using the Internet to research, select and apply for degree courses