Free tuition SNP-style is not all it’s cracked up to be

There is something rather odd about the SNP’s decision to attack Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer over the issue of university tuition fees. Higher education is, after all, a devolved matter. No prime minister, whether Labour or Conservative, will ever have a say in how Scotland delivers for students. Despite this, the SNP is currently focussing attention on Starmer’s position vis-a-vis the cost of going to university. In 2020, Starmer promised to scrap tuition fees in England —  now, according to the Nats, he is ‘set to abandon his promise’. 

So keen is the social media-savvy SNP to see this message spread that at the start of last month, it pinned it to the top of the party’s Twitter feed — and it’s still there. The truth, always denied by the SNP, is that the party exerts so much effort attacking Labour because it would very much prefer the Conservatives to win the next General Election. The presence of a Tory in Downing Street is, after all, far more useful to the SNP. How can the Nats promise only independence would mean an end to distant Conservative rule if no such rule is taking place?

This message about tuition fees is really aimed at voters south of the border, people who’ll never be troubled by an SNP candidate. The abolition for tuition fees for Scottish students is one of the Scottish nationalists’ more frequently – and loudly – trumpeted policies. The party is, I think, quite right to think this is an issue with mileage among English voters who might look north, wistfully, and imagine being free of the shackles of hefty tuition fees for their own kids.

Those voters should pause for thought. Free tuition SNP-style is not all it’s cracked up to be. In order to fund the tuition of ‘Scottish domiciled’ students, the Scottish government not only requires those from elsewhere to pay heavily, it also has to set a cap on the number of higher education spaces available for Scottish students. No such cap exists when it comes to those travelling from other countries — indeed, universities are encouraged to offer as many places to foreign students as possible, for, without their subsidising payments, the free tuition fees policy would collapse.

More Scottish teenagers than ever before may be going on to higher education, but the fact is that the number of pupils who fail to gain a place at a Scottish university has doubled since the SNP’s abolition of fees. At St Andrews and Edinburgh, around 30 per cent of first-time undergraduates are Scottish domiciled while about 40 per cent of students at Glasgow and Aberdeen come from outside Scotland. Many Scottish kids who would once have strolled into these fine establishments are now forced to look elsewhere, including England with its burdensome fees.

Along with the strict cap on spaces has come the removal of funding from the further education sector. More than 120,000 college spaces have been abolished, reducing opportunity for kids from less affluent backgrounds. A half-baked effort to rebalance opportunity in favour of these kids has seen Universities forced, though use of a clumsy algorithm, to prioritise applications from candidates from poorer areas.

This system not only penalises straight A students from wealthy families but straight A students from poor families who just happen to live in certain postcodes. From beyond Scotland, the abolition of tuition fees surely looks deliciously appealing, but the reality of the policy is far from palatable. In order to make it work, the SNP has made it more difficult for Scottish students to make it to university and created new barriers to opportunity for the worst off. Those who yearn for the policy to be replicated in England should be very careful what they wish for.