Liam Burns: Fees will be barrier to poorer students

Published on Thursday 10 September 2009 22:11

TUITION fees do not widen access. To say they do is both wrong and disingenuous.

Unprecedented cuts in public spending, a Westminster review of top-up fees, and a huge increase in numbers applying for university all mean that universities in Scotland are under pressure.

What really angers students, however, is the attempt to disguise a call for more money for universities as some sort of altruistic bid to help poorer students into higher education.

Tuition fees were tried and tested and found to be wanting in Scotland ten years ago. They are still being tried south of the Border, with pressure mounting to allow English institutions to charge as much as the market will allow.

As it currently stands, with students being charged 3,000 a year, thousands of pounds of bursaries are going unclaimed and student numbers from poorer backgrounds have remained relatively unchanged.

The reality of the bursary system introduced in England to make top-up fees more palatable is that the elite universities are able to offer their (relatively few) poorer students up to 1,790, while those less prestigious institutions (with a higher intake of students from disadvantaged backgrounds) had only 680 to offer.

The bursaries system in England has failed the poorest students, and the poorest institutions.

Re-introducing fees will act as a barrier to poorer students. The Sutton Trust found last year that two thirds of school pupils who choose not to go onto higher education cited money worries as their primary concern. And yet Lord Sutherland seems to think that dangling a price tag in front of them before they even open a prospectus is a good thing. I think not.

Suggesting this proposal will be beneficial to poorer students is simply trying to find a palatable spin on an already discredited system. We need a new way of looking at widening access, a way that actually analyses the problem before proposing a solution, rather than making assumptions that all that is holding working class students back is the lack of scholarships. We need to be clear on the barriers preventing people from accessing education, before we can provide effective remedies.

&#149 Liam Burns is president of NUS Scotland.