We must stop treating EU students as pawns
Higher education policy seems to be geared towards the wealthy, says David Robertson
The Scottish government is in a generous mood. They recently announced that EU students who start their studies in 2018/19 would have their tuition fees paid by the Scottish taxpayer for the duration of their whole course.
Such largesse shows, as a spokesperson said, that we ‘value and appreciate our EU students’ – except that some appear to be more valued than others because the English, Welsh and Northern Irish are specifically excluded.
In 2002/3 EU students made up 4.5 per cent of the Scottish university population. By 2012/13 it had almost doubled to 8.7 per cent. The trouble is that these extra EU students are not extra students for the universities, because the number of students at universities is capped by the Scottish government. Thousands of extra EU students are being paid for by the Scottish taxpayer, at the expense of preventing Scottish students from attending university.
Only 8 per cent of students at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and St Andrews are from the poorest 20 per cent of the Scottish population. There are now more EU students paid for by the Scottish government at these universities than there are poor Scots!
When Michael Russell, the Scottish Government Brexit spokesperson was asked why EU students no longer coming to Scottish universities could not be replaced by Scottish ones he replied because “Scottish budget not limitless – each Scottish student paid for by Scotgov”. But so is each EU student. Meanwhile the Scottish government have slashed the maintenance grant for poorest students by 20 per cent and cut the number of college places by thousands. Why is this happening? One SNP politician tweeted after the announcement that he hoped EU politicians would now be nice to Scotland. What is going on here is that the obsession with the EU seems to have so taken over the government that it cannot see the wood for the trees. They have forgotten that their primary responsibility is for the people of Scotland, and especially the poor.
This is not providing for the poor from the banlieus of Paris, the northern suburbs of Athens, or the southern areas of Bucharest. No – this is the Scottish government paying for the already educated European middle classes to come and be educated here at the expense of the Scottish taxpayer. The trouble is that Higher education policy seems to be geared towards the wealthy and biased against the poor. Universities are being run like corporations, with CEOS on corporate style salaries, seeking to bring wealthy customers from the UK, the EU and Scotland. In theory the poor are wanted. In practice they are discriminated against.
The government should stop using EU students as political pawns and instead seek to take advantage of the opportunities Brexit offers. Let the wealthy who want to come here from other countries pay for the privilege, and let’s take some of what they give to support the poor from home and abroad to take advantage of our wonderful universities! ● David Robertson lives in Dundee. A longer version of this article can be found on his blog www.theweeflea.org.