Free tuition, fewer places: the SNP’s university betrayal

IN JULY, HERIOT-WATT UNIVERSITY, in Edinburgh, closed clearing to Scottish students. This is the logical conclusion of the SNP’s “no fees” policy which has created a two-tier system that systematically disadvantages Scottish students and has left Scottish universities seriously underfunded. Sixty-one per cent of Scotland’s universities now operate in deficit, with many shutting courses and shedding teaching staff just to keep their heads above water.

These developments have been a long time coming and were warned about in Spiked! some six years ago, when I was a lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland in Paisley.

What we can see now are the inevitable consequences off an ill-thought-out policy more concerned with political vibe than actual educational need.

Scotland illustrates the danger of taking the offer of free higher education at face value. From 2008, the Scottish government, led by the Scottish National Party, provided free tuition for Scottish-domiciled and EU students attending Scottish universities. (The latter group lost its subsidy in 2021 following the UK’s legal departure from the EU on 1 January that year.) The SNP advocated its “free” tuition policy as a way to expand higher education participation among the most socially disadvantaged. But despite SNP headlines that the number of Scottish students in post-compulsory education is at an all-time high, drilling down into the data tells a very different story.

Scottish universities in general draw about 60 per cent of their undergraduates from Scotland, with the balance being international or from the rest of the UK. Over many decades St Andrews and Edinburgh universities have been the exception, with the proportions reversed. Figures from HESA list only 28.2 per cent of students as Scottish at St Andrews and 30.4 per cent at Edinburgh. Separate investigations by the Sunday Times and The Scotsman both pointed to the low number of Scots at the two universities being exacerbated by the cap on numbers that the Scottish Government will fund. As mentioned previously, Heriot-Watt University controversially closed UCAS clearing to Scottish students once it had filled all the places available under the Scottish Government cap.

The SNP has overseen a period of marked disinvestment in the Scottish higher-education sector. A 2019 Public Funding Observatory Report, produced by the European Universities Association (P29), reported negatively on public funding levels at Scottish universities – with Scotland the only country in Europe assessed negatively in three of its four categories: research, teaching and infrastructure.

Far from widening participation, the Scottish government’s no-tuition-fees policy, combined with continual disinvestment, has created a two-tier system that encourages Scottish students to be treated as second-class citizens in their own country as they are unable to obtain access beyond the cap. It also actively penalises Scottish universities for recruiting Scottish students. This crisis is the very real result of SNP-enforced austerity. As Audit Scotland revealed in its 2019 report, government funding to the university sector had been reduced by twelve per cent over the previous seven years.

In effect, Scottish universities have been subjected to a level of penury that would make the most fiscally punitive Tory blush. In recent years, however, the issue of tuition fees has been used by successive devolved administrations to signal Scotland’s ethical and caring approach to capitalism. Although tuition fees were abolished in 2000 by the first devolved administration – a Labour / Liberal Democrat coalition – it wasn’t until 2008 that tuition could be considered properly “free” in Scotland, when the first SNP government scrapped the one-off graduate endowment fee that was payable by the student on completion of a degree course (initially set at £2,000, rising to £2,289 in its final year).

higher education is, and will continue to be, based on the ability to learn, not the ability to pay

In 2011, the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat UK government announced it was raising the cap on fees at English universities from £3,375 to £9,000. The decision was made against a background of public-sector austerity and a £600 million real-terms budget reduction for three-quarters of English universities. Following Scottish elections later that same year, the Alex Salmond-led majority SNP administration reaffirmed its opposition to the reintroduction of tuition fees in Scotland. As Mike Russell MSP said at the time, “higher education is, and will continue to be, based on the ability to learn, not the ability to pay”.

However, the SNP’s apparent egalitarianism was not extended to all. Only those students domiciled in Scotland and the EU would be eligible to pay no tuition fees. Scottish universities would be free to charge higher variable tuition fees to students domiciled in the rest of the UK and those outside the EU.

Under EU rules, all EU nationals are entitled to access a fellow member state’s education system on the same terms as the state’s own nationals. However, these rules do not apply to the regional education systems within member states. Scottish universities were allowed to charge students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, while offering students from the EU free tuition.

This policy has proven to be a total disaster for Scottish students and Scottish university education more broadly. The actual number of places available to Scottish undergraduates is policed through the imposition of a cap. The Scottish government limits the number of Scottish-domiciled students that Scottish universities can recruit to their courses and programmes, and imposes financial penalties on those universities that do not adhere to the cap. SNP austerity has been exacerbated by the no-fees policy and it is clear that the policy is now beginning to bite hard.

More than half – eleven out of eighteen – of Scottish universities are in deficit. Newly released analysis from the Funding Gap Analysis team – a joint initiative launched by the Scottish Government and Universities Scotland to review the funding of Scotland’s eighteen higher education institutions, has highlighted the increasing dependence on international students’ fee payments to cross-subsidise the tuition of Scottish undergraduates. The report states the gap between what the Scottish Government pays Scottish universities for teaching Scottish students and what it costs them to run the courses is £288m a year.

In comparison, international student fees mean that non-publicly funded teaching generated a surplus of approximately £445 million. The report states:

“The composition of teaching income changed noticeably between 2016/17 and 2023/24. The proportion of teaching income derived from non-EU students increased from just under one third in 2016/17 to nearly 50 per cent in 2023/24, making it the largest single source of teaching income by the end of the period. At the same time, the proportion represented by Scottish Funding Council teaching grants decreased from around 38 per cent to 27 per cent, while income associated with Scottish-domiciled students decreased from around 14 per cent to 10 per cent.”

“Income from students domiciled elsewhere in the UK remained relatively stable as a proportion of teaching income (around 8-9 per cent), while income associated with EU students decreased in more recent years from 3.6 per cent in 2020/21 to 2.9 per cent in 2023/24.”

The BBC has calculated that universities made a loss of £2,703 per Scottish student in 23/24, the academic year covered by the report.

Despite this being the era of “no tuition fees”, international tuition fees have replaced government funding as the single largest source of income for most Scottish universities. Scottish government-funded fees for Scottish-domiciled students are notoriously inadequate. At £1,820 per academic year, they pale in comparison to the average fees Scottish universities can now charge: £9,790 for students from the rest of the UK; £15,000 to £28,000 for non-EU undergraduates on classroom-based courses; £22,000 to £35,000 for science, engineering and nursing; and £55,000 to £63,000 for degrees such as medicine or dentistry. The Scottish domicile cap and the enormous disparity in fee income implicitly discriminate against those Scottish students whom the SNP policy purports to be helping, because they limit both the number who can get into university and, in practice, the universities they can attend.

SNP has created a system that discriminates against Scottish students, especially those from the poorest social backgrounds

Under the current funding regime, Scottish universities are forced to increase income by targeting RUK and non-EU international students. It will come as no surprise that (according to HESA figures) the income from RUK students has increased by £118 million (190 per cent), from £62 million to £180 million between 2014-15 and 2023-24. Over the same period, income from non-EU students increased by £762 million (156 per cent), going from £488 million to £1.25 billion. By comparison, income from Scottish students (via the Student Awards Agency Scotland) increased by only £30 million (17 per cent), going from £170 million to £200 million. It will also come as no surprise that it is the elite Scottish universities that have benefited most from the growth in non-EU undergraduate fee income.

Deliberately locked out of Scotland’s elite universities, which look to the RUK and non-EU markets, the majority of Scottish students end up either in clearing, or at those very universities whose lack of access to RUK and non-EU markets has already left them financially challenged. Universities Scotland, the representative body of Scotland’s eighteen HE institutions, has consistently argued that the funding to cover free tuition is wholly inadequate and does not cover the actual cost involved in a student’s university education. As a result, these already struggling universities are forced to subsidise this obvious shortfall through cuts to teaching and support staff – cuts which have indeed happened.

It is an added irony that those universities most penalised by the SNP are the very same institutions that are blazing a trail in widening participation – the Scottish Government’s key strategic priority for Scottish higher education. For instance, in the academic year 2017-18, the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) had an operating deficit of £3.3 million – a three per cent fall on 2016-17. For the same period, the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh operated with surpluses of £23.5 million and £27.5 million respectively.

These massive inequalities are pretty easy to understand once placed within the context of SNP cuts in higher-education funding. Sixty per cent of UWS income came from Scottish Funding Council (SFC) grants (i.e., subsidised student places). This was the second highest in Scotland. At that time only eighteen per cent of Edinburgh University’s total operating income was generated from SFC grants, by 2024/25 it had fallen to fourteen per cent.

However, UWS is a sector leader in widening participation. Eighty per cent of UWS Scottish-domiciled entrants to full-time undergraduate study are drawn from Scotland’s most deprived areas, as defined by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. Again, this isn’t that surprising given that UWS’s main campus in Paisley is a stone’s throw from Ferguslie Park, a suburb of Paisley and one of the poorest and most deprived areas in Europe. But, as members of this cohort have the poorest progression and highest non-completion rates when at university, UWS is rewarded for its efforts to widen participation with government sanctions.

The SNP commitment to free tuition equates to an attack on Scottish higher education. University teaching and research have become subordinate to chasing income markets that the majority of Scottish universities have no real access to. Knowledge and scholarly endeavour now play second fiddle to universities’ financial imperatives. For too many students, higher education in Scotland means little more than packing them into under-resourced and failing learning environments, and then telling them they should be grateful for it.

In almost two decades of government, the SNP has hollowed out Scottish higher education. The “fauxgalitarian” rhetoric of no tuition fees has allowed it to pose as a bulwark against the increasing consumerism dominating the sector in England. In reality, however, a very real and heavy price has been paid. Rather than helping Scottish students get to university, the SNP has created a system that discriminates against them, especially those from the poorest social backgrounds. Scottish students get to go to university not because of the SNP’s no-fees policy, but despite it. Effectively marginalised by Scotland’s elite universities, they find themselves at institutions penalised for recruiting Scottish students.

Ill-defined and ill-thought-out, like many SNP policies, free tuition is born of a desire to virtue-signal. Rather than really opposing the neoliberal valorisation of higher education, the SNP offers a textbook example of neoliberalism in action. Regressive in principle and practice, the SNP’s policy has ended up punishing the very Scottish students it was supposed to help.