Brian Wilson: Education? ‘No Scottish need apply’

THE Scottish Government’s commitment to a ‘no tuition fees’ policy is populist and counter-productive.

THE Scottish Government’s commitment to a ‘no tuition fees’ policy is populist and counter-productive.

GREAT news – I picked up the local paper and saw an advertisement announcing that a team from Edinburgh Napier University will be descending on the locality to recruit students looking for places through the clearing system. And there are plenty of them available. Hurrah!

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Well, great news if the aspirant students live in Carlisle; not at all, if they are from Dumfries. For the local newspaper I was looking at was published in Cumbria and the headline on the advertising feature ran; “Edinburgh Napier to Help Cumbrian Students”. Now, I am all in favour of helping Cumbrian students but not of discriminating against Scottish ones.

And that is exactly what is happening. I checked out Napier’s website and, as of yesterday, they were offering clearing places to Scottish-domiciled students on precisely two courses – Nursing (Learning Disabilities) and LLB (Graduate Entry). For youngsters living south of Berwick, there are no such limitations. The Napier recruitment teams are heading for Newcastle and Carlisle. Helpline numbers are provided. There are an impressive 135 courses on offer through clearing.

It is an astonishing state of affairs and, I sincerely hope, an unsustainable one, in which Scottish universities are being forced to put signs up which say: “No Scottish Need Apply”. My reference to Napier is purely random because of that advertisement. It is not their fault and the same affront to fair play and equal opportunity is going on at most of Scotland’s universities.

A survey last week showed that of 72 law courses across Scotland, 42 will not take any more Scottish school leavers. Of 148 economics courses, only 28 are open to Scots. Relative qualifications are not the determinant. The places better-qualified Scots are being denied access to are being sold to their counterparts in the rest of the UK or outside the European Union.

The Scottish Government, which is responsible for this state of affairs, takes refuge in the number of Scottish school-leavers who are gaining university places, over 22,000 at the last count. That is missing the point on a grand scale because the headline number of admissions fails to tell us how many eligible students are being denied places and also conceals crucial information about the nature of the courses they are admitted to.

Universities need money – and they are adept at getting it, one way or another. The two-tier system opens up all sorts of opportunities for creative financial directors. For example, the absence of a cap on non-Scottish student numbers will lead to additional recruitment on the “pack ’em in if they can pay” principle. And the incentive will exist to shift the balance of fee-paying students, as opposed to those funded within the Scottish cap, towards higher-value courses.

If anyone else was presiding over such a system, the squeals of Nationalist outrage would be deafening and the green ink would be hurtling through cyberspace. Yet the remarkable truth is that it is a Scottish Nationalist administration which has placed this cap on the number of Scottish students who can gain admission to Scottish universities, which are then able to sell places to less-qualified students from furth of Scotland.

At the root of this issue is Alex Salmond’s boast that “rocks will melt with the sun” before he introduces tuition fees of any kind for Scottish or EU students, other than those who live in the rest of the United Kingdom. Like most pieces of overblown rhetoric, that commitment has to be paid for by someone else. And it is increasingly apparent that the longer it is adhered to, the more damage will be done to Scottish education and the more anomalies will arise.

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The commitment to no tuition fees has a superficial political appeal, especially for those who benefit directly from it. But populism should not be confused with radicalism. There is nothing radical about “free” higher education for people who can well afford to make a contribution to its cost since it is inevitably paid for by those whose needs are greater and options fewer – of which the “clearing” discrimination is the latest example.

The standard response is to recall halcyon days when some of my generation went to university without paying fees and now, it is said, we want to deprive others of that right. However, this is a jibe rather than an argument. At that time, one in 14 Scottish school-leavers went to university. The privilege of the few ensured the denial of the many. Carrying that same principle into an era when almost half go to university has no rational basis.

I happen to be writing this in Sweden where there is a long social democratic tradition of services being “free”. There is also a long social democratic tradition of very high taxation. In order to create equilibrium, both are required. In Scotland, successive Holyrood administrations have run a mile from utilising even the tax-raising power at their disposal while adhering to the fantasy that “free” services, from prescription charges to higher education, can be offered to rich and poor alike. In practice, that is redistributive in exactly the wrong direction. There is no equilibrium.

Widening access to higher education is an infinitely more important social objective than keeping it “free” for all. That is the area in which radical thought, rather than permanent lip-service, is required and Scotland’s devolved powers should be utilised in order to make a difference. There are whole Scottish communities that do not expect to send more than a handful of their youngsters to university, now or in the future. But I fear that the rocks will melt in the sun before that scandal takes priority over headline-catching populism.

Then consider the treatment of the Further Education sector, which is of far greater direct relevance to 
a broad strata of Scottish society than the universities. Without any regard for the consequences, the 
FE budget has been cut by 13.5 per cent causing student numbers to fall and hundreds of courses to disappear. This and other budgets are being raided in order to pay for the “rocks will melt” commitment, yet it will still never be enough to bridge the university funding gap.

When I became Scottish education minister in 1997, I learned quickly that the universities always wanted more money and that they dealt in very large sums indeed. Before addressing that issue, I decided to give the FE sector every penny it was asking for, probably to its great surprise. But what they were asking for was minuscule in comparison with the universities’ funding demands – and gave great value. We seem to be back to the days when FE takes the pain in order to help fund an unsustainable and self-defeating university funding policy.

There is plenty of scope within devolution for Scotland to do things differently, and perhaps better, 
than the rest of the UK. But the emphasis on “different” rather than “better” has now been taken to such excess as to be tragicomically counter-productive.

A Nationalist government is ensuring that Scottish students cannot apply for vacant places at Scottish universities while our universities and colleges still face a funding gap, which no amount of political bluster will be able 
to conceal.