Higher Education, Equal Access, and Residence Conditions: Does EU Law Allow Member States to Charge Higher Fees to Students Not Previously Resident?

This article looks at the law and policy issues surrounding the practice of charging uniform fees for higher education to home students and students coming from other EU Member States. It begins with the observation that within the EU such fees are heavily subsidised by governments and therefore amount to a financial benefit (or a disguised grant) to students. In the light of this, this article suggests that restricting that subsidy to students resident prior to their studies would be not only compatible with recent case law on non-discrimination but would also fit better with the underlying logic of free movement, which denies any right to benefits for non-economic recent migrants. Secondly, it looks at the policy, and finds that while equal fees have a number of very positive social effects, they also carry moral and economic risks. A better approach, less distorting of the market for higher education and more consistent with the wider EU approach to welfare migration, might be to require exportability of subsidies from the student's state of origin.