A tuition fees row could sink the UK’s Brexit reset

On Monday, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Minister for the Constitution and European Union Relations and the government’s lead negotiator on the EU reset, arrives in Brussels for a meeting of the joint EU-UK parliamentary partnership assembly, mob-handed with Europe minister Stephen Doughty and trade minister Chris Bryant.

On Tuesday, Rachel Reeves gives her second Mais lecture, in which she’ll argue that closer EU alignment is central to the government’s growth agenda and represents the “biggest prize” for the UK economy. She told the Times at the weekend that “where that requires alignment in our national interest, we should absolutely align.”

And into this carefully choreographed week of pro-European enthusiasm has landed a row over tuition fees.

The UK-EU “reset” has three main workstreams due to land by a summit expected in late June or early July: an SPS/food trade deal, linking the UK and EU carbon emissions trading schemes, and a youth mobility scheme (rebranded by ministers as a “youth experience scheme” to manage migration optics). The first two are well advanced. The third has stalled – and the reason is tuition fees.

The EU wants fee equalisation for European students. The UK says fees weren’t mentioned in last year’s framework agreement and the idea is a “non-starter.” Brussels says fee equalisation is in the European Council’s negotiating mandate. Both sides claim to have been clear all along.

The Common Understanding, published on GOV.UK and agreed at the May 2025 summit, is unambiguous in what it doesn’t say. Paragraph 13 reads:

The European Commission and the United Kingdom should work towards a balanced youth experience scheme on terms to be mutually agreed. The scheme should facilitate the participation of young people from the European Union and the United Kingdom in various activities, such as work, studies, au-pairing, volunteering, or simply travelling, for a limited period of time. It should provide a dedicated visa path and ensure that the overall number of participants is acceptable to both sides.

At the summit press conference, Starmer was explicit – the agreement “doesn’t deal with university fees…so there’s no change there.”

What the negotiating mandate says

But a month later, the European Council adopted Decision (EU) 2025/1286 on 20 June 2025, authorising the Commission to negotiate. The Decision itself is published on EUR-Lex, but the actual negotiating directives – the bit that matters – are in a restricted addendum.

We know what’s in it, though. The UK Trade and Business Commission, which has had sight of the mandate, reports that it states the UK-EU youth experience scheme should “address the main hurdles for young Union citizens (e.g. in respect of education tuition fees or of work placements as part of Union studies) which other options (such as the United Kingdom Youth Mobility Scheme) do not address.”

And more pointedly, the mandate states: “Equal treatment is also provided in respect of tuition fees for higher education” – meaning EU citizens should be charged the domestic rate.

There’s a lineage here. The European Commission’s original April 2024 recommendation – the one Sunak rejected – explicitly proposed equal treatment on tuition fees, noting that EU citizens currently studying in the UK face “very high” international student fees. That language survived into the June 2025 Council mandate, even though it never made it into the Common Understanding.

The mandate also states that equal treatment “should not extend to study and maintenance grants or loans.” The EU is explicitly not asking for loan access – only fee equalisation. That limits the fiscal exposure, but also limits the demand response, because many EU students from lower-income member states would still need to find upfront cash to pay even the home fee rate.

The UK Government’s explanatory memorandum on the Decision, submitted by Thomas-Symonds in August 2025, is bland on all of this. It says “the UK has been clear that any scheme should be in line with the UK’s existing schemes including participants having no access to benefits and no right to bring dependents” and that “the financial implications of any UK-EU youth experience scheme will depend on the detailed parameters agreed in the next phase of discussions.” No mention of fees at all.

So what would fee equalisation actually cost? Mark Corver of Campus Numerics puts the cost at £140m in the first year, and £400m across the three-year period of a typical course.

This is a relatively straightforward static calculation based on current volumes – around 28,400 EU students enrolled on a new UK university course in 2023/24. The Russell Group’s figure is £580m. Their LinkedIn post from mid-February says the modelling shows lowering fees to domestic levels:

…would cost UK higher education around £580m, based on the current number of EU students in Britain.

Neither figure models what happens to demand. EU enrolments fell by 57 per cent after post-Brexit rules were implemented. Numbers from Romania and Poland fell by 80 per cent.

If fee equalisation brings numbers back even partway toward the pre-Brexit baseline of 153,000 enrolled students, the cost escalates sharply. If it doesn’t – because upfront payment without loans is still prohibitive – the Russell Group’s figure might be an overestimate. But this isn’t the sort of aspect the EU is likely to agree to any capping on.

The cross-subsidy trap

The Migration Observatory’s take is the most sober assessment available. Although the end of free movement caused a sharp drop in EU students at UK universities, it argues the financial impact on institutions has been limited, because the higher fees paid by new EU students partly compensate for their smaller number. In 2022/23, UK universities still earned about £940m from EU student tuition fees – only 30 per cent less than in 2020/21, despite a much larger decline in enrolled student numbers.

EU students are now net contributors to the cross-subsidy model rather than net beneficiaries. Reversing that turns them back into a cost centre – at just the moment when the sector already argues it’s already losing money on every home student.

The EU mandate explicitly says it’s not pursuing loan access – but without loans, any fee concession would still limit access to UK universities to those EU students with access to enough upfront cash to pay both their tuition and maintenance costs for the length of their course.

That dampens the demand response, and means fee equalisation without loan access might not bring numbers back anywhere near pre-Brexit levels – particularly from the central and eastern European member states that have seen the steepest declines.

Oh and Scotland. When the UK was in the EU, EU undergraduate students in Scotland paid no fees – because EU non-discrimination rules meant home students and EU students had to be treated the same, and Scottish students qualified for free tuition. If fee equalisation returns, does that mean EU students in Scotland go back to paying nothing? Or can Scottish institutions treat EU incomers like English incomers and charge them “rest of UK” fees?

The Swiss comparison

The EU has done this before – and very recently. The new Swiss-EU treaty package, finalised in late 2025, includes a non-discrimination clause on tuition fees. Swiss universities will no longer be allowed to charge EU citizens more than domestic students. The Swiss federal government has published the cost: CHF 41 million per year across all affected institutions – roughly £37m.

The ETH institutions (Zurich and Lausanne) face a combined shortfall of CHF 23.6m, having only recently introduced differential fees. St. Gallen and Lugano are pushing back hard on the transitional compensation terms.

But the difference is scale. Swiss base fees are CHF 1,000–4,000 per year. The differential being eliminated is measured in hundreds of francs, not tens of thousands of pounds. Equal treatment in Switzerland costs institutions almost nothing.

The Swiss deal does include some protections – admission restrictions remain permitted, quotas on EU student numbers can be maintained or introduced, and a standstill clause prevents universities from reducing their current EU student intake. That’s non-discrimination on fees but with managed numbers – exactly the kind of cap-plus-reduced-fees compromise that the UK might land on. But EU negotiators will be wary.

The Swiss federal government is also compensating universities for the revenue loss, even if the cantons are unhappy about the terms. Bern had little choice – Swiss universities are publicly funded, the cantons control them, and without a compensation package the deal would have been blocked at cantonal level.

The UK has no equivalent pressure. It makes fee equalisation an unusually attractive concession for UK negotiators: it can be presented to Brussels as a big move, while potentially costing the government nothing at the point of agreement.

What’s really going on

The FT reported on Sunday that the UK position may be softening – that Britain would “explore” lowering tuition fees but only as part of a “very big” offer from Brussels, and that the Department for Education is working on calculating how much any concession would cost. That’s a shift from “non-starter” to “we’re doing the maths.”

The UK Trade and Business Commission’s report recommended that EU students should continue to pay international tuition fees, given the financial pressures on universities. That’s the position of UUK and the Russell Group, and it was the UK government’s position until approximately last weekend.

Somewhere between “non-starter” and “we’re doing the maths,” a concession is being priced. The question is who pays for it – Brussels, the Treasury, or universities. If recent form is any guide, it’ll be universities. So much for reset week.