Number of Scots going to university shows 'free' tuition fees aren't working

It will always be Preston Poly to us, and the swanky new facilities are a far cry from our windowless room in a depressing ’60s office block. So too is the course; we were all in and out after an intensive nine months, but now it’s a three-year degree programme. We were also a mixture of graduates and school leavers, and I only ended up there because, as a graduate, I was barred from the only journalism course in Scotland at Napier.

It's only in the last 25 years that journalism has become a widely available degree subject, with Strathclyde, Stirling, Glasgow Caledonian, West of Scotland, Robert Gordon and Napier all offering four-year BA courses which, despite negative publicity about the industry, remain hugely popular. There are good diploma courses in colleges like Glasgow Clyde, but for many students these are not a quick way of learning the tools of the trade, but an alternative route to university courses.

Like so many occupations, a university degree is now seen as the starting point for journalists, even though it’s not a specific requirement. Police recruits are now graduates and the old cadet system, with fresh-faced lads in the caps with a blue hatband, long consigned to history. Nursing is a degree subject. And will there ever be other high achievers in the finance world like the late Standard Life managing director Scott Bell and the subsequent CEO Sir Sandy Crombie who joined the company as trainee actuaries straight from school?

Whether it is institutions and businesses ending training schemes, the John Major government’s short-sighted decision to let the old polytechnics become universities – many of which then added arts courses they didn’t need – or school exam-grade inflation, the number of Ucas acceptances rose 68 per cent from 336,000 in 1997 to 563,000 in 2022.

Here, an unsustainable belief that a free university education should be as much a right as school, without much heed to the efficiency of the courses or, until recently, the impact on the public purse, has produced an inevitable financial crisis. That the SNP deliberately degraded further education colleges to help cover the cost of free tuition remains a stain on its reputation.

According to Scottish Funding Council annual reports, there were 146,000 full-time-equivalent student places in Scottish universities in 2022-23, compared to 137,000 in 2018-19, while college places fell by nearly 500 to 118,200. Scottish universities will receive around £900m of direct Scottish Government funding this year, but according to a report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies in February, the £7,610 per student this represents is a 19 per cent real terms reduction from 2013–14, so the only other way of making ends meet for basic undergraduate teaching has been to cap the number of free places, and find more non-Scottish students willing to pay.

Filling the revenue gap with the gravy train of exorbitant fees charged to overseas post-graduate students for courses of varying quality was always likely to hit the buffers at some point, but coinciding with funding cuts at home is the worst-case scenario. It’s long been recognised that the flow of Chinese postgrads would dry up when the Chinese government invested in its own university expansion, but the currency collapse in Nigeria, a rich source of fee-paying students, has caught many institutions on the hop. So too have new UK family visa restrictions.

The result is that Scottish universities are now at tipping point because they have just received a worse than expected cash-terms cut of six per cent in government funding, and across the country departments are now dropping courses as budgets are slashed and recruitment freezes imposed. It’s certainly happening at Stirling, where I teach part-time. The principals of the most vulnerable institutions, such as Robert Gordon’s, West of Scotland, and Queen Margaret, have become much more vocal about their challenges, itself another sign that the civic omerta which closed down criticism of the SNP at the high point of its political dominance has finally broken.

But here’s the thing, for all the hyperbole about Scottish education and the benefit of free undergraduate tuition, a Sutton Trust report from October last year pointed out that Scotland has the worst record for university entrance of any part of the UK. Some 51 per cent of young Londoners go to university, 40 per cent in Northern Ireland, but in Scotland it’s just 30 per cent, the same as North-East England. The need for top-to-bottom reform of Scottish education has never been clearer.

Something has to give, be it a reduction in places, courses, institutions or the end of tax-payer funded undergraduate courses for all, but solutions are there for the taking to build a properly sustainable tertiary education system. They will, however, require the swallowing of bitter pills.

First and foremost is the philosophical leap that university is not a universal right which must be funded from general taxation, and that will probably require a change of government in 2026. But then there is the pointless adherence to the basic four-year course, when the rest of the world delivers bachelor’s degrees in three, which just delays entry into the workplace by a year and may help explain the low entry numbers.

When the statistics point to dismal failures which are not replicated elsewhere, the need for a hard look at the current approach to higher education in Scotland could not be clearer, and it should start with the free, four-year degree structure. If young Scottish people are less likely to go to university than their English counterparts despite courses being given away, something has to change.