The tuition fees rich list: These are the unis making the most money from tuition fees

If there was a student version of “it’s coming home”, it’d surely be “nine grand for this?” – a sentiment that rings out like a murmur across the country, expressing the vain hope that things could be better and the dull realisation that you’re continually getting shafted.

It’s no secret that unis rake it in from tuition fees. But things have turned into a half-a-billion pound moneymaker for some.

In 2015/16, the country’s top earner was Manchester, which brought in £423 million. Just four years later, the earnings of UCL, which occupies the top spot, were £602 million – an increase of 40 per cent.

Manchester, in second place, managed to bring in a cool £500 million in a single year.

And it’s not just the top earners. Across all unis, tuition fee income was £21.5 billion – an increase of a quarter since 2016.

This is according to stats from uni data boffins HESA, which measure a uni’s income from tuition fees and education contracts for the 2019/20 academic year – up to March 2020.

These are the 25 unis which make the most money from tuition fees:

1. University College London: £602,884,000
2. The University of Manchester: £500,553,000
3. The University of Leeds: £432,313,000
4. King’s College London: £428,828,000
5. The University of Oxford: £392,482,000
6. The University of Edinburgh: £390,583,000
7. University of Nottingham: £388,987,000
8. The University of Birmingham: £379,166,000
9. The University of Warwick: £360,070,000
10. The University of Sheffield: £354,232,000
11. Imperial College, London: £337,718,000
12. Coventry University: £336,442,000
13. The University of Cambridge: £334,477,000
14. The Open University: £330,659,000
15. The University of Liverpool: £324,279,000
16. The University of Bristol: £315,548,000
17. Cardiff University: £297,005,000
18. Newcastle University: £288,176,000
19. The Nottingham Trent University: £286,901,000
20. The Manchester Metropolitan University: £274,997,000
21. University of the Arts, London: £274,595,000
22. The University of Exeter: £274,463,000
23. Queen Mary University of London: £268,171,000
24. The University of Southampton: £266,472,000
25. The University of Glasgow: £248,926,000

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