Free tuition doesn’t solve everything
PREVIEWING the next day’s papers for BBC News last weekend, I was all set for the next twist in the Brexit saga.
But, lo and behold, the headlines were about student tuition fees. That’s tuition fees in England.
While marvelling at how May’s Government had managed to get a domestic policy story and not Brexit into the papers, I began to feel it was one of these “apart from viewers in Scotland” moments.
University tuition in Scotland is free, after all, until “the rocks will melt with the sun” – to quote the preposterous monument Alex Salmond had erected to himself as a totem that cannot be touched.
“No fees” smugness has created too much complacency in the Scottish Government’s attitude to higher education.
Shirley-Anne Sommerville, the Higher Education Minister, issued a self-congratulatory response to Theresa May’s review, as if there was nothing to see here.
In fact, as the Scottish Government’s own commissioner for fair access told the Holyrood education committee this week, there is plenty to see here.
Sir Peter Scott told MSPs that students from deprived areas are less likely to stay until second year, more likely to obtain a general degree rather than honours and less likely to get a graduate job.
He said: “There’s a very complex picture of discrimination and disadvantage at play here. Just getting people admitted and then leaving it – that’s not enough.”
The no fees policy has not widened access to higher education. A reliance on fee-paying foreign students means artificially high entry standards are freezing out Scottish students.
How can the English system of tuition fees be more successful in offering university places to youngsters from less well-off backgrounds?
Scotland, as much as England, needs to review its education priorities – and there should be no sacred totems.