Wednesday 22-04-2026 - 16:45

 

 

 

 

Each year, Lancaster University Freshers must pay £40 to their College (£15 for Graduate College). If you don’t, “the University may take action to recover those sums and/or apply appropriate sanctions.” (section 26 of the 2025-26 student contract) – this could include exclusion from degree ceremonies. You may have paid this fee yourself, or might have been lucky enough to have a parent pay for you. 

 

But what does this mandatory fee actually pay for? Can the University demonstrate to you a paper trail of exactly where your money goes? And how can you, the customer, influence what your money is being spent on? 

“[The JCRs] have absolutely no idea what it's for but it's painted as being something we have control over.” – Kate Bracewell, Lonsdale JCR President 

The Lancaster University website outlines four areas: “welfare”, “events”, “funding”, and “general”. These are very vague headings, and difficult to quantify – what proportion of your £40 goes to what? This detail should be readily available on the website, so why is it not? 

“A lot of incoming students and parents make the assumption that the college membership fee that they pay for goes directly to the events that we, as their college JCR, run.” … “It’s frustrating to work for collegiate student experience but not being able to provide [students] with an answer when we don’t know ourselves.” – Haneef Shittu & Suhaani Hardikar, Grizedale JCR Presidents 

£40 per Fresher amounts to about £20,000 per year per College, or around £180,000 total per year. All students have access to know is that £2000 goes to each College JCR Exec, this is only 10% of the total sum. 

“When it came to freshers week I had a lot of students asking where the money went. I thought I had a good understanding of this, but I was completely wrong. If we don’t know where the money truly goes what does that say?” – Emily Smith, Cartmel JCR President 

So, what about the rest of it? Do you see £18,000 of returned investment in your College each year? Do you see the same quality of experience across Colleges given you are all paying the same amount? 

“Students are having to pay the same across all 8 UG colleges, when 3 of us have had our bars shut down.” – Sam Dosanjh, Pendle JCR President 

“Why should Students of Colleges with closed Bars pay the same fee to ultimately get a completely different experience and offering from the University? I've been personally blamed and in a few cases verbally attacked in town over the Bar being closed.” – Sonny Remmer-Riley, Bowland JCR President 

 

JCR Executives are affiliated student groups of LUSU, and yet none of this fee goes to us to help resource and facilitate their activity. With £180,000 at our disposal, we could have more staff dedicated to student groups (£180,000 is five members staff with money to spare!), a wider diversity of College Sport with better support, end of year events like Extravs or Summer Ball at a grand scale, and a lot of free food! This is all if LUSU had the money, but the range and scale of what could be done with this money in the hands of students is huge. 

“Understandably, running a college can be expensive and our college membership fees may be used appropriately. However, when students are not given transparency about where and how their money is being spent, this becomes concerning.” – Yasir Shahbaz, County JCR President 

 

If this were any other club or society at a university, this fee would be set and managed by the elected students leading the activity, they are held accountable by the paying members, and those student leaders will gain valuable experience in managing money. Why can’t students see this here, for a sum which you, or your parent, had no say in paying. 

Students need to see some transparency and accountability for the College Membership Fee – regular reporting within the College, and a clear and easy mechanism for elected JCR execs to direct how student money should be spent. This is the first step to building trust over the fee which continues to be a spending black hole for the students paying it. At a time when cost-of-living impacts students so hard, now is so important to know where every penny you spend is going. 

 

This article was amended on Friday 24th April 2026.