Leader: Universities should be allowed to make their own call

EDUCATION secretary Michael Russell yesterday criticised the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, which he claimed should have shown “greater restraint” in setting the tuition fees for students from outwith Scotland at the maximum level of £36,000 for a four-year course.

Such criticism from Mr Russell is a bit rich, for two reasons. First, it was the education secretary himself who proposed the limits to the fees which higher education institutions in Scotland could charge, while at the same time he rejected imposing fees on Scottish students.

Secondly, Mr Russell was once far more radical in this policy area, arguing in a book he co-authored that students, as consumers, should be able to force universities to respond to their purchasing power, provided by the state. The corollary of that must be for the institutions to be able to set fees at a level they think the consumers – in this case, students mainly from England and backed by the state – can bare.

St Andrews and Edinburgh have judged they can charge the maximum level. What remains to be seen is whether they are right in this judgment, whether the market Mr Russell once embraced will tolerate this level or whether they will be forced to lower their fees. If, as the education secretary warned yesterday, the universities have disadvantaged themselves, they will find out soon enough and be forced to change – a better way for supposedly independent institutions to work than answering to ministerial fiat.