Is the SNP changing its tune on free university places?

The SNP’s much trumpeted policy of free university tuition allows ‘radicals’ to indulge their fantasies of Scotland as a fair and compassionate country. Nationalist politicians sell the scheme as a way of opening up higher education to those who might previously have been priced out of post-school study. The reality is that the wealthiest are the scheme’s big winners: a higher proportion of children from better off backgrounds go on to university.

Is the SNP now having a long overdue rethink? Appearing before Holyrood’s finance committee on Tuesday, deputy first minister and finance secretary Shona Robison said 1,200 spaces for Scottish students would not be funded next year. When Labour MSP Michael Marra pointed out that a proposed £28.5 million budget cut would be the equivalent of a reduction of about 3,800 student places, Robison conceded that the number of student places cut might be higher than the figure she presented to MSPs.

Before the SNP won 2007’s Holyrood election, Scottish students were spared up-front charges for tuition and then, after graduation, they were expected to pay an endowment. The nationalists abolished this back-door payment, making tuition truly free for the first time. Popular with voters, especially the middle class ones who expected their kids to go to university, the policy was hailed by the SNP as a game-changer in terms of opening up access to young people from poorer backgrounds.

But the detail of the policy revealed its many flaws. In order to fund all this free tuition, universities had to ensure they had enough spaces for students from outside Scotland who would pay full bung. And in order to make room for these cash cow students, universities had to put a limit on the number of spaces available to Scottish students. 

As a result, a Scottish school leaver with five Highers at grade A, who once would have likely had their choice of university, is no longer guaranteed a place. A presumption within the system towards widening access to higher education for those from often poorer-performing school in deprived areas puts an extra squeeze on the middle-class families who love this policy until their kid can’t get into Glasgow to do medicine.

There have been fears in educational circles about the sustainability of the free tuition policy for some time now (I wrote about such concerns for Scotland on Sunday back in August 2015) but ministers have adopted the traditional SNP approach of burying their heads in the sand. The upshot of this inaction is that thousands of university places for Scottish students are now under threat.

Each year, over 30,000 new Scottish students enter university. Across the academic years, more than 120,000 students – resident in Scotland when applying to study – pay no tuition fees. But funding of what the Scottish government describes as ‘core teaching activities’ has been cut by six per cent and ministers have been advised to look at further cuts to the number of university places for Scots.

Just like the extension of the provision of free prescriptions to include the wealthiest, the free tuition fees policy is decorated to look like a bold act of social democracy but designed to win the support of those who truly benefit: the better off. Free tuition has been central to the SNP’s message for two decades but as the policy falls apart and it locks increasing numbers of bright Scottish teenagers out of university education, will the nationalists have the courage to admit it’s time for a rethink?