Home > Policy > White Paper, Notice, Announcement > White Paper > FY2003 White Paper on Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology >Part1 Chapter4 Section3.3

Traditionally, many universities in the UK are established as independent organizations with charter of the crown. Therefore, although there are cases of universities that are formally termed "private," all but one university receive subsidies. A defining characteristic of many UK universities is that the majority of their expenses are covered by subsidies. With the exception of the mid-1990s, educational costs such as public finance expenditures (mainly by the national government) have been increasing along with the expanding scale of students (0.7 percent of GDP as of 2000, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation of Development (OECD)). The government is also indicating its intention to increase higher education expenditures, including science and technology research expenses, to about £10 billion (¥2 trillion) by 2005, a 30-percent increase over the amount in 2002.

However, since public finances alone cannot cover the rapid increase in the number of students, the traditional free tuition system was replaced by a tuition fee system implemented in 1998 that set an across-the-board fee of £1,000 (raised to £1,100 in 2002). From 2006, the charging of tuition fees up to a ceiling of £3,000 (about ¥600,000) at the discretion of each institution of higher education and the setting of different tuition fees for different majors will be recognized.

To promote further the effective use of rising education budgets, the government is carrying out subsidy allocations based on the results of research evaluations described earlier. From now on, in tandem with allocation based on these evaluations, the government will advance measures for a concentrated allocation of public subsidies to research-oriented universities.