How the number of Scottish university students plummeted by 10,000 in a year

The number of Scottish students studying at the nation’s universities fell by almost 10,000 last year, new figures have revealed.

There were a total of 173,745 enrolments from Scottish students in 2022/23, down from 183,025 in 2021/22.

However, the number remained close to 10,000 higher than it was in 2018/19, when there were 163,480 Scots.

The data has been published amid fresh scrutiny of the way Scottish universities are funded, with institutions increasingly reliant on the high fees of overseas students to help plug gaps in Scottish Government funding for the “free tuition” of undergraduate Scots.

It also comes just a day after the principal of Edinburgh University revealed how it modelled the impact of the loss of international students in the early days of the Covid pandemic, and found “universities would be rapidly bankrupt if there was not mitigation”. Umbrella body Universities Scotland described the statistics published on Thursday, by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, as offering a “snapshot from almost two-years ago”, before recent “fluctuations” in international student numbers, which have left the sector in Scotland facing a £100million financial black hole.

The figures show Scots made up more than 59 per of the total number of students at Scottish universities in 2022/23, with international students accounting for 29 per cent, or almost 84,000, while nearly 10 per cent enrolled from England.

There were significant variations, however, with international students accounting for 47 per cent of the total at St Andrews University and 42 per cent at Edinburgh University.

About 26 per cent of St Andrews students were Scottish, with 24 per cent coming from England, while at Edinburgh a quarter were from England and 29 per cent were Scottish.

An investigation by The Scotsman in February found the majority of schools and departments at Edinburgh and St Andrews universities made a higher rate of offers to prospective undergraduates from overseas compared to those from Scotland.

Data published on Thursday shows that St Andrews and Edinburgh universities actually increased the number of Scottish students in 2022/23, bucking the trend elsewhere.

Glasgow University has the highest number of Scottish students, but the number fell from 20,520 in 2021/22 to 19,670 last year.

Strathclyde University has the second most, although it dropped from 18,520 to 17,010 in the same period.

There was also a significant fall at the Open University, with the number of Scots going down by several hundred at Aberdeen, Dundee, Stirling, the University of the West of Scotland, Glasgow Caledonian, Napier, and the University of the Highlands and Islands. The data has been published in the same week it emerged acceptances for the coming year to Scottish institutions for home students had increased by 7 per cent to a new high of 31,220.

However, universities also lost funding this year for more than 1,200 extra places for Scottish undergraduates created during the pandemic. A Universities Scotland spokesperson said the data set was a snapshot from almost two-years ago.

“That means this data does not provide a sense of what universities are experiencing now. We are hopeful that the volatility of the last year has levelled out, but we won’t know the real impact of this for some months,” it said.