Not so free

Clark Cross (Letters, 26 May) raises the issue of the cap on Scottish students being accepted to study medicine at Scottish universities.

The situation is worse than he says. There is in fact a cap on EU students as well as Scots, as EU students don’t pay fees either. It transpires from figures disclosed to a national newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act that in medicine, 2,816 Scots have been accepted by Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St Andrews and Dundee universities in the past five years. 13,896 suitably qualified Scots applicants were rejected.

This is solely because the SNP have put a cap on the number of free places at universities for Scots and EU applicants, regardless of how well qualified they are, as they have a budget for the subsidy for free places.

A check on graduation lists, published annually in the Scotsman, in medicine, sciences and engineering faculties of the major universities, will show that the overwhelming majority of graduates are Asians or Africans who pay large fees. This is a situation created by the SNP and their free tuition policy. Something is only free if is available and the figures show that for the majority of well qualified Scots it is not.

It is clear the “free tuition” is actually denying well qualified Scots access to their chosen course of study to their detriment and the detriment of Scotland. We are educating the rest of the world to prop up an unsustainable ideology. DONALD LEWIS

Beech Hill Gifford, East Lothian