The farce of ‘free’ tuition that forces bright kids out of Scotland
IN the grounds of a Scottish university, there is a commemorative stone bearing a solemn vow made by a former First Minister.
A beaming Alex Salmond was pictured at its unveiling, proud of his pledge that the ‘rocks will melt with the sun’ before Scots pay to go to university.
More than five years on, that promise has been maintained – one of the few that has survived intact – although the eagle-eyed might notice the nuanced wording.
The full inscription on that stone, at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, reads: ‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scotland’s students’ – and of course Salmond is no longer in office.
Not that his successor shows any sign of changing tack, and yet evidence is piling up that ‘free’ degrees are no longer sustainable.
Amid the backslapping about how egalitarian Scotland is, the statistics tell a different story: increasingly, Scots are finding it harder to secure a university place in Scotland, because of the SNP’s ‘cap’ on student numbers.
The Nationalists’ argument is that there has to be a cap – otherwise the policy of refusing to charge tuition fees would become unaffordable.
But it only applies to Scots and EU students (whose degrees are funded by the Scottish taxpayer); and once it’s breached there’s nothing to stop universities recruiting from abroad, or south of the Border.
It’s a crucial income stream, as applicants from England and overseas do pay to study here: as one expert told me: ‘International students have been buying their way in to Scottish universities for years – and now English students are doing the same.’
New figures show only 55 per cent of university applications from Scotland resulted in an offered place last year, while the equivalent figure for those based in England was 74 per cent.
EU students had a 65 per cent offer rate, 10 per cent higher than Scots, despite competing for the same Scottish Government-funded places; and thanks to an SNP commitment, they’re still entitled to study here for ‘free’, (well, £93million a year), at least for the time being.
This means pressure on places for Scots will intensify – without that undertaking to go on paying for EU students, their numbers, post-Brexit, probably would have reduced.
Former senior civil servant Lucy Hunter Blackburn, once head of higher education at the Scottish Government, believes there’s a ‘time-bomb’ looming because the number of Scots applying for university is set to soar.
She told me: ‘The really big issue here is the capacity of higher education – in a few years, we’ll see the results of a “baby bulge” – as a result of the larger numbers of babies being born between 2005 and 2008.’
For now, she says, the system is coping, just about, though many talented Scots are being turned away from universities and heading south, or abroad.
But the projected increase in the number of applicants means even more of them will be squeezed out of Scottish institutions.
One expert on higher education funding said government was ‘sitting on its hands’, adding: ‘They’re pretty poor at planning; they function like an opposition, despite being in power since 2007.
‘That means the “boring stuff” – like planning for the future – is quite far down the list of priorities, and they tend to focus on whatever it is that their special advisers are concerned about on any given day.’
A possible solution is simply to ‘loosen’ the cap, so that when the population of prospective undergraduates increases, there is some room for manoeuvre.
True, it would cost more, but continuing apathy also carries a price-tag.
How can we hope to retain the best and brightest (particularly with the SNP’s onerous tax regime), when we can’t accommodate them in our universities?
Altering that rigid cap, which is militating against the career prospects of a generation of young Scots, will cost – and that will lead to what cautious civil servants might euphemistically call ‘difficult decisions’ – not traditionally the strongest suit for the SNP.
But it is legitimate to ask how much more evidence it needs before deciding to act, given that over 14,000 applicants from Scotland were denied a university place in 2019, about 60 per cent more than before the SNP scrapped the graduation fee in 2008.
There are more uncomfortable figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which suggest an average of 49.9 per cent of entrants at Scotland’s five top universities were not from Scotland in 2016–17.
Meanwhile, as well as the cap on student numbers, there is a Government-led drive to widen the social mix at universities: again, a laudable aspiration, but for middle-class families all of this begins to look like a cocktail of factors that will freeze their children out of Scottish campuses.
At the same time, universities in Scotland have seen their funding slashed by more than £90million between 2014 and 2018.
Not that the sector always inspires much faith in its own budgetary proficiency – just look at the furore over Professor Andrew Atherton, who quit as principal of Dundee University last year amid claims he had fallen behind on rental payments for a plush property.
Despite having left his £298,000-a-year post, the Professor – who only took up the role a year ago – has been told he can stay in the university flat until February 2020.
Fat-cat principals aside, shouldn’t university officials be calling on the SNP to reconsider its plans for the future of the cap on student numbers – rather than quietly raking in millions from overseas students (who pay up to £30,000 a year to study here?)
Mind you, the relationship between the top tier of university management and the Nationalist hierarchy hasn’t always been plain sailing.
In 2013, Salmond was accused of attempting to pressure the then principal of St Andrews University, Professor Louise Richardson, into watering down her warnings about the adverse impact of Scottish independence – hardly setting the tone for an open dialogue…
See it in a wider context, however, and it’s clear the problems are more fundamental: what about the rest of the SNP’s education policy?
Universities are having to contend with the fallout from disastrous reforms at school level, while also being ordered to take in more students from deprived areas by lowering entrance criteria.
This helps to cover up the failures which are now endemic in state schooling – but what’s really happening is that less able applicants are benefiting from crude social engineering, while standards slide.
Bursaries for those less well-off students have been slashed to pay for ‘free’ degrees, which might well be contributing to high dropout rates – two Scots universities, Abertay in Dundee and the University of the Highlands and Islands, topped a recent UK league table for the number of students failing to complete their courses.
Yet the SNP continues to be bound by a hubristic promise made by a former leader which is proving impossible to keep – and helping to drive an exodus of young talent away from their own country.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on January 14, 2020.
