Higher demands

Today the wait is over for Scottish school leavers to find out whether they have achieved the grades needed to study at one of their own country’s universities.

I wonder how many of them know the Scottish Government has weighted the odds against them. By capping the number of funded places at Scottish universities, the SNP government has created the insane situation in which there will be no clearing places available for Scottish applicants with good grades, but there will be places for English students with lesser grades.

This extract from Herriot Watt’s website makes this plain, and lays the blame squarely where it belongs:

“Clearing vacancies – international (non-EU) applicants and applicants from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. All of our undergraduate programmes have vacancies in Clearing and are open to applicants from England, Wales and Northern Ireland and to international (non-EU) applicants.

“Clearing closed – Scottish applicants. Due to Scottish Government limits on the number of places, the University has no vacancies in Clearing and is closed to Scottish applicants who are not eligible to be considered under the above initiative.”

Thus Scottish candidates are disadvantaged by government policy, and propelled into applying to England through the scrum that is Clearing with potentially higher grades than the English candidates who can apply to Scotland.

Perhaps this is part of the SNP’s attempts to fund independence, using English fee-paying students to pay for our education system.

Graham Whitehead

Doune