Letter: Tuition green paper lacks crucial details

The green paper on higher education (your report, 18 December) is immensely disappointing. At a time when university staff, students and potential students across Scotland are increasingly anxious about the future, all the government can do is produce a document with glaring and elementary deficiencies.

First, there is now going to be a consultation on the issues without the green paper providing any estimates of what the various funding options might generate in money terms. How is it possible to have a sensible consultation when this most basic information is missing?

Second, despite all the usual rhetoric about "fairness", there is absolutely no discussion of the distributional consequences of different ways of funding higher education.

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Our current system provides substantial subsidies to the better off from the generality of generally poorer taxpayers. Is that "fair"? One of the key issues of the debate should be how we weigh these distributional issues against concerns for access.

Nobody in their right mind thinks Scotland should adopt the planned system in England, but if we are to have a "Scottish solution" we need Scottish politicians to offer a much more intelligent lead to discussion than this green paper provides.

Jim Tomlinson

Bonar Professor of Modern History

University of Dundee

Dundee

Your pages on university funding issues cleverly juxtaposed two of the three voting groups which will decide the next Scottish parliamentary election - the student first-time voter and the pensioner.

Your contributors made their cases, but failed to spell out the implications for the ballot box.

Student first-time voters haven't figured very significantly in recent elections, but by Heavens - prompted by the perceived attack on their interests by a Unionist establishment - they will next time, and the pensioners can be trusted to come out again to cast votes in defence of their diminishing fixed incomes under assault from government funding cuts.

If the next SNP manifesto includes undertakings to maintain no tuition fees for Scots students, free care for the elderly, free health care at the point of delivery, free prescriptions, free bus passes and a another council tax freeze - and is believed to be even partially deliverable - it will be a winner.

A political party with the votes of the young, the old and the poor in their pockets (who together make up a clear numerical majority of the electorate) will simply not need to court the favour of any other section of society, and, despite the encouragement of the opinion polls, I fail to see what the Scottish opposition parties will be able to do to counter that.

I'm going to place a bet on the SNP to win again in May; maybe that referendum isn't as far off as some might think.

David Fiddimore

Calton Road

Edinburgh

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In any systems management there are two approaches to a funding shortfall.Firstly, you can increase income and, secondly, cut costs. In the sphere of university and other post-school education the emphasis has been on increasing income by fees offset by loans or tax. But what has not happened is an analysis of the actual spending in the sector.

From principals living rent-free in plush, expensively refurbished accommodation with their car and driver at the door, to lecturers whose contact with research and students is minimal, it appears no one has actually questioned just how much value for money students and the government get.

We have universities offering courses which leave questions over suitability and standard and enticing students whose chances of gaining fulfilment in personal terms or employment are slim.

We have whole departments vastly overstaffed with lecturers whose actual production in research and teaching is questionable, and lecturers who spend most of their time in meetings or in some cases indulging in political activity.

Our MSPs should be asking how money is spent in the sector. Education should be based on ability to learn, and funded accordingly.

Graduates, if they earn higher salaries, pay higher levels of National Insurance and income tax and with their higher disposable income pay more VAT. They repay some, if not all, of the public investment in their education.

But the real question is are we making the best use of the investment?

Bruce D Skivington

Strath

Gairloch, Wester Ross

Scotland is truly "sleeping with an elephant" over Westminster's tuition fees in England. The Westminster government has for years seemed to be fixated by English tuition fees.

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While education is indeed fully devolved in Scotland, tax raising is not. This means the Scottish Government needs to find new methods of funding further education if it is to avoid being forced down the Westminster route.

This may mean English students studying in Scotland face higher tuition fees. This may be necessary to avoid "economic migrant" students from England. In the absence of fiscal autonomy, such proposals do make sense and need to be evaluated.

However, Professor Tom Gallagher of Bradford University (Letters, 18 December) claims that such proposals are "nothing less than racist" and the "thing that regimes hostile to particular ethnic and religious minorities got up to between the two world wars".

Such comments are a complete slur on the proposals and the integrity of the Scottish Government itself and are unworthy of a member of the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford.

Prof Gallagher would be better directing his vitriol at the root cause of this issue - the Westminster government.

Michael N Crosby

Muiravonside

By Linlithgow