Update: 21st July 2011 – the OU fees for September 2012 onwards have now been published – see this article for details.
A couple of days ago, OUSA very helpfully provided an indication of when OU students might be able to gain some clarity on what OU course fees might be in autumn 2012. I first wrote about this topic a month ago, when it looked as if it might not be until the spring of next year that any clarity would be forthcoming. At that time, Four in Ten (a campaign from the OU) said:
We hope to be able to announce how much OU courses starting from September 2012 will cost by Spring 2012.
The new information from OUSA suggests that students (current and prospective) might not be in limbo for quite so long. They write:
The University is currently in the process of finalising its policy for the setting of fees from autumn 2012 with a final report expected to be considered at a Council meeting in July. The University has made a commitment to communicate its broad policy on fees to students in July and to publish the more detailed information about the costs of individual modules in January 2012.
This seems to be a little more encouraging (in terms of when we will have clarity) than what was being said a little over a month ago by the OU.
The same OUSA article gives a strong indication that transitional fee arrangements for those already studying with the OU for a degree will definitely be put in place. Marianne Cantieri, the OUSA president, is quoted as saying:
I am talking to students in England regularly who don’t even realise that there will be transitional arrangements which will mean that many of those who have already started their degree will be able to complete it without facing the changes.
This appears to be further confirmation of the information given out by Four in Ten on 19th May:
We are committed to enabling students that started before 2012 to complete their studies at a price and pace consistent with their expectations when they began their studies.
One thing does occur to me however. Many people study OU modules without formally linking them to the qualification they are working towards on their student record. I hadn’t bothered doing this myself until earlier on this year. It’s simple enough to do this online through the student homepage, so it might be a wise piece of insurance to do this soon if you want to make sure you can benefit from any transitional fee arrangements. It’s simple enough to change your mind at a later date about the precise qualification you want to accept.
It may well be too early to make any assumptions about fees as the OUSA article states, but one thing will be certain for new OU students (post autumn 2012) who live in England, unless the government has a massive change of heart. The headline OU module fees will be substantially more than they are now.
I’d go a little further than just attaching the course/module to a single qualification if you have courses that could potentially fall into more than one area. Even if that’s not currently the case, it might be prudent to attach at least one module to the open degree. Somehow I can’t see them having a loophole quite wide enough to allow you to do a totally different degree at the old prices via that route, but you never know and there’s no downside to doing it anyway. As it stands, late 2012 should see me with only two 30 pointers to go for my Life Sciences degree and I’ll probably be getting going on the Psychology one again at that point.
One potentially marginally brighter note for us in NI is that the funding agency is moving over here. Apparently that has the side-effect that they will be able to collect funding from the Republic of Ireland too. Having said that, given the dire state of their finances, I suspect that it’s a none too reliable source of money.