Fees Up and Fees Down, 2025

One perennial topic – maybe the most perennial topic – in higher education is that of tuition fees. There have been quite a number of developments with respect to tuition fees around the world this year and I thought it was worth recapping some of them for y’all. So here goes.

In the category of countries lowering student fees, the action is almost all in Africa. Namibia has taken the bold step of announcing a completely free tuition system in its public system of higher education starting in early 2026. However, having announced the program back in March, it has yet to actually announce how the system will work in practice (in particular, it has yet to be made clear how the system will interact with private universities. Further north, Ghana’s President put a new “no-stress fee free” policy into effect this summer. Under this scheme, the Student Loan Fund pays first-year fees on a student’s behalf if they are attending a public university or college. A similar policy was of course implemented in New Zealand by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government, and it proved not to be very effective at promoting access. Perhaps the results will be different in a developing country where financial barriers to access are in practice steeper than they are in places like New Zealand, but the more likely result is that what you will get is overcrowding in public universities as students switch from the private sector to the public.

Kenya, whose universities seem to be in a perpetual crisis because of lack of money, decided to make things better by lowering tuition fees by between fifteen to fifty percent. In theory, this money will get made up by government grants, but that’s a promise the government may find difficult to keep. Meanwhile, over in Malaysia, the state of Sarawak (the larger of the two provinces on the island of Borneo) has also announced that it will no longer charge tuition fees in the four public universities located there (there seem to be a few programs where fees will continue but it’s not clear to be which ones or why). 

So much for the places where fees are going down. In most of the world they are heading in the other direction, particularly in Europe.  Ireland, in theory, has had no tuition since the mid-90s; what they have had for most of that time are compulsory charges which to all intents and purposes act as tuition fees. When COVID hit, those were at about €3,000 per academic year. The government of the day decided to give students a big untargeted subsidy to help them out and reduced that fee by a third (sort of like CESB in Canada but smaller in size). Now, the government is letting that lower rate lapse. In Belgium, the government of Wallonie-Bruxelles, under significant pressure to cut its budget deficit, increased tuition fees (known locally as “minerval”) by about 40%, to about €1200 for next year. The Swiss government, similarly trying to cut public spending, is looking to double tuition fees to about SFR2500/year, starting next year (tuition fees for international students tripled this year with basically no enrolment effect). 

A more complicated case arose in Bulgaria, where the wording of a new Higher Education Act tied tuition fees to program subsidies. Since institutional subsidies had been rising in recent years, this meant a very sudden and very large increase in fees.  Somehow this mistake was not noticed until universities started posting their tuition rates in accordance with the new policy, at which point there was a large uproar. Government quickly reduced fees by 40%, but this still left students paying more than they did before.

There were also significant instances of tuition increases in Asia, but the role of government was not always clear. In China, institutions can set tuition fees largely independently of government (although of course they are internally answerable to the Communist Party committee within the university, which could presumably put a stop to matters if the government found institutional policy inconvenient). Public funding for higher education in China is still below where it was at the outbreak of COVID, and so top universities have been raising tuition fees significantly; this policy came under fire this year, with some questioning whether this might create an affordability gap for poorer students.  In Iran, where the country is in its sixth consecutive year of 30%+ inflation, the semi-private Islamic Azad University (its status is complicated, you can read a good summary here), which hosts between a quarter and a third of the entire country’s student body, was reported to be increasing tuition, in some fields six-fold. And finally, in Korea, most public institutions have faced a tuition freeze dating back to 2012, one which was largely enforced by moral suasion from government rather than an outright ban. This year, 70.5% of institutions said to hell with moral suasion and raised tuition, up from about 15% the previous year. The actual size of the increase was fairly small, however – just 4% in total.

So, there you have it. The countries likeliest to go tuition-free are those that are poor and have rapidly growing student numbers in any case. Basically, all of these countries have decided that at their stage of development, access is more important than quality, which is fine if and only if government funding alone can keep pace with demand; otherwise, policies to remove or lower tuition mainly ends up as a subsidy to the urban middle class. Richer countries, on the other hand, tend to be finding it hard to maintain their existing high levels of subsidy to universities, either because of sclerotic economic growth, or the pressures of population aging, or both, and this is resulting on pressures to ask students for contributions. In moderation, this probably makes sense, especially where tuition is low to begin with (e.g. Belgium). But it sure doesn’t make anyone popular.