Are We Getting Our Money’s Worth?

April 20, 2026 The Gown Queen's University Belfast 26 Views 0 Comments belfast, QUB, QUBSU 3 min read

By Sean Colligan

A recurring thought in my mind and surely in the minds of many other students across campus, studying everything from the likes of finance to pharmacy to sociology, is whether or not all the hassle with loan debts and tuition fees is worth the degree at the end of it all. While thankfully for the majority of us students local to the North tuition fees are capped at £4855, just over half the price of admission one would expect to pay in Great Britain [1], the idea that I may not be getting the best value for money does strike me every time I see that I’m timetabled for an online class at nine in the morning or some other ungodly hour. Personally, I had hoped we had left the wilderness of Zoom meetings back in the early 2020s, with their muted mics, cameras on approach to learning left firmly in the dust now that we’ve been safe to mingle in person for a number of years now—what about feng shui and all those principles of separating work and play? Perhaps all our early morning, probably self-inflicted hangover fatigue can all be safely chalked up as manifestations of bad chi.

The idea of fees being solely for tuition is a bit of a misnomer, considering all full-time undergraduate programs offered by Queen’s are charged £4985 per annum [2], meaning that students pay the same for the more intensive courses like medicine with plentiful amounts of teaching and contact hours as they would for something like film studies, which is more self-directed. If they really are ‘tuition’ fees, why is everyone paying the same amount for vastly differing specifications? And why do international students have to pay up to £47,000 [3] for the opportunity to study in Belfast—is the labour involved in teaching someone from Bangladesh more inherently expensive than which is used to teach someone from Bangor? The real answer is that all of this is used to keep the university afloat.

silver and gold coins on white printer paper — Photo by Alaur Rahman on Pexels.com

There’s nothing wrong with my money being used to subsidise Queen’s. I am getting a degree at the end of my course of studies, hopefully anyway, and I’m paying for use of the library, the facilities at the SU, teaching time… and not much else, really. The SU would be free to me even if I wasn’t at QUB, since all the Methody kids get free rein anyway, and while the McClay does have a pretty impressive collection and nice seating, I feel like paying just under five grand is a bit steep. Suddenly, this whole concept of having to pay fees in the first place seems a bit stupid whenever it doesn’t include accommodation or even a membership to the PEC. So all this cost is simply to give me the legal basis for self-study and a recognition of my efforts at the end of it all, which can vary depending on what part of the UK or Ireland I’m from. We naturally assume it was Thatcher or Major or somebody or another who shackled all this nonsense on us, but it was actually Blair who introduced them back in September of 1998. All of this eyerolling from older generations—we have it so good, we’re ungrateful, all the rest—seems a bit rich when a large majority of them benefited from free further education. If only we were all Scots!

Admittedly, it’s not really any of us who have to deal with the cost of anything (yet) as the burden falls onto the taxpayer, whose contributions help finance the Student Loans Company until we start earning enough to start making repayments, but with all the usual right wing talking points of returns to imagined good old days that never really existed, why can’t we get a return to the days without maintenance grants and tuition loans? If we’re never going to be able to retire until we’re all crooked and half-mangled over Zimmer frames because the pension age will go up to triple digits, at least let us enjoy the benefits of our cousins in Edinburgh and Aberdeen and beyond who get to avail themselves of free university tuition. In a world increasingly beset by misinformation, paranoia and general ignorance, a renewed push to make universities centres of learning and development for all may be one of the ways we may begin to see brighter days.

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