Kingston University’s Vice Chancellor, Peter Scott, has publicly condemned a rise in tuition fees, by speaking out to the Independent.

Professor Scott said he fully opposed charging undergraduates higher fees, in reaction to some vice chancellors’ calls for university fees to double to £6,500 a year, from their present cap of £3,145.

The Vice Chancellor said: "I have always opposed – and will continue to oppose – charging undergraduate student fees. Hundreds of thousands of graduates would have been denied opportunities to benefit from higher education if we had charged fees in the past, and the country would be the poorer for it." But, he added: "I am realistic enough to recognise that I am in a small minority among vice-chancellors."

The current cap on tuition fees was adopted in 2004 with the promise of a government review of the cap limit this year. Yet some university leaders, facing the prospect of declining public funding as the recession hits public finances, are keen to see the cap lifted. A  BBC survey of vice-chancellors, with anonymity for those who participated, showed the range of fees some wanted was between £4,000 and £20,000 a year.

But Prof. Scott said that if the cap had to be raised, he would wish for it to be no more than £5,000:  “[Higher]fees get the Government off the hook. They can transfer more of the cost of higher education onto indebted students and bail out banks instead.”

First year Kingston media student, Amir Dosanj, said she could not have afforded to come to university if the fees were increased: “I think university is expensive already. There is no way I could have afforded to go to university if they were increased.  I struggle as it is, especially with the recession. I don’t want to leave university with that amount of debt.”

Some have argued that different universities could charge separate fees to one another, helping to solve the needs of each university but Prof. Scott was quick to disagreed with this proposal: “If this is allowed it would be a class case of the Matthew principle ‘to him that hath shall be given, and to him that hath not even the little that he does have will be taken away’. Already rich universities would become richer, while poorer universities would see their income dwindle still further, because they would have to charge lower fees, and because Government support for universities would be cut.”

But it seems there is no cause for alarm yet as Higher Education Minister David Lammy said a review of the tuition fee cap would not be finished until June 2010 and UUK, which represents British vice-chancellors, stated that no students are likely to face higher fees until 2013.