Not sure what the answer is but without more funding the sector is going to decline. Tuition Fees go against the grain with me, but that means increased state funding.
It was nice while it lasted.
If we’re taking money from the most vulnerable then it’s only fair tarquins mummy and daddy should pay to send their kid to uni, or at least keep vital degrees free ie medicine, because how marine biologists do we actually need
It wasn’t that long ago I was heavily downvoted on this sub for saying the snp were likely kicking the can down the road to whoever comes in after them with this growing to be a bigger issue.
We need to assess which courses count as degrees.
I done events management at degree level which could have absolutely been a college course with less funding and a lower cost.
Create a level above hnd for these courses and stop allowing lecturers to set their prices.
I can’t in good conscience support removing this from other people when the tuition fees being paid was the only reason someone from my background could manage a University education.
One of the key things here is that we’ve built the education sector around everyone in Scotland going to Uni, so if you scrap free tuition then people from poorer sectors don’t apply and education STILL ends up in the toilet.
There’s a lot going on with education right now. One of the key problems is that if industries collapse, as they have, they can’t pay for research. Tuition fees cover about 50% of the cost of education, and Unis rely on secondary income streams like research funding to pay for it, so that’s been a hit too – pump money jnto rejuvenating engineering and medical research and we’ll claw some of that back.
Another issue is that the tuition fee is only fixed for undergrad. Post grad courses can charge a more realistic fee, so undergrad education is just getting less and less support in favour of postgrad. I’m in a position where our undergrad is overly specialised and its looking increasingly like we’ll end up watering it down and putting all the “good” teaching in a postgrad.
I’d support raising tuition fees to cover more of the education, so undergrad courses are less of an afterthought, and swapping free education for a means-tested grant scheme, meaning that kids from low-or-no income households get free undergrad education while rich kids pay the full amount… but I don’t honestly know if it would change anything. There’s a chance that if we did this AND raised tuition fees, between the higher grant costs and the cost of a means-testing system we end up paying out just as much from the government coffers.
It’s just hella complicated. I don’t think there’s a simple answer to it.
The UK tightening of student visas has contributed to a big drop off in the income for universities. Dundee saw their numbers dropping by over 25%.
Education should be a right, not a privilege. Education plays a crucial role in fostering critical thinking. Without it, we’re just a bunch of fucking bams. Reform-voting bams.
It really should be reviewed degree by degree. Nursing – free tuition. Drama – You pay for it. STEM – free. Gender Studies – you pay for it. Anything that is a luxury and isn’t vital, the individual should pay for. Anything that will benefit those around you, the government should support.
It’s depressing that journos just go with press releases. Yes it’s true home students are subsidised by international fee paying students. However the fees the unis raked in over the last 5 years resulted in a huge surplus so that new buildings and a large number of additional staff could be hired. Been discussed here earlier for Edi but it’s the general picture I reckon. Increase the critical mass of staff and presto the uni will have a noble prize winner in no time…
Canadian here – educated populations do better than uneducated ones. Ensure that the money is not going to diploma mills and invest in your kids. They might be grateful (someday)
I think the answer to this question is not a moral one but an economic one. I went to uni in London and I still have a 70k+ debt. But I’m not paying a penny of it back and it’s going to get written off in a decade with no ill effects on me. Many in our generation are in the same boat. Ultimately the question is whether these thousands of unpaid debts are actually costing the taxpayer more or less money than simply paying for the cost of tuition outright.
I used to think that raising the cost of tuition back in 2012 was idiotic – but I think the reality is somewhere buried in a balance sheet. Ultimately, if you’re not wealthy and have to be supported by a large student loan to receive a university education, you are under no obligation to ever pay it back unless you become financially stable enough to.
What I would worry about is bringing in fees, and therefore tuition loans, could unlock the door to future changes to this lack of repayment obligation, which IMO is far more dangerous and detrimental than the existence of the fees themselves. I think we can all agree that a US-style system, where education can leave people financially crippled for the rest of their lives, would be an awful thing to see in the UK.
There is more to lose from putting a financial barrier in the way of education than there is to gain.
More doctors, engineers, actors, composers, etc. many of whom may have been priced out of higher education.
Even if you didn’t directly benefit from higher education yourself, you’ve almost certainly inadvertently benefitted from it.
I will always be happy to advocate for free tuition as it’s provided me opportunities I wouldn’t have had if I had to pay. Scrapping this would be political suicide for whoever dared to do it, particularly with the younger voting base. Brexit yet again inflicting serious damage to something that worked well.
Right now the situation doesn’t work for anyone except rich kids. Universities don’t have enough funding, in Scotland or England. Caps on number of places means entry requirements are going up while students are struggling to cover all their living costs. Plus, our primary and secondary schools are struggling, with thousands of kids leaving school without nat5 maths. Whole system needs reform
The current situation is entirely the making of the UK government. First they reduce funding and tell universities to bring in tuition fees. They then cap these fees, meaning with time they bring in less and less revenue for universities. The answer was to encourage more international students, whose higher fees would ‘subsidise’ the loss made on home students.
When this, inevitably, increased immigration, the government freaked out, and told universities they needed to prioritise home students. But because of the cap, no amount of home students would fill the yawning gap in finances.
The only answer now, as we’re seeing, is aggressive cuts. But we shouldn’t be upset at the universities for having to do that – they have simply done what successive governments have asked them to do.
The current situation is entirely the making of the UK government. First they reduce funding and tell universities to bring in tuition fees. They then cap these fees, meaning with time they bring in less and less revenue for universities. The answer was to encourage more international students, whose higher fees would ‘subsidise’ the loss made on home students.
When this, inevitably, increased immigration, the government freaked out, and told universities they needed to prioritise home students. But because of the cap, no amount of home students would fill the yawning gap in finances.
The only answer now, as we’re seeing, is aggressive cuts. But we shouldn’t be upset at the universities for having to do that – they have simply done what successive governments have asked them to do. It’s depressing, but Scotland’s free tuition is likely unsustainable in the very near future if there isn’t UK-wide changes to how universities are funded.
Free tuition was really one of the primary reasons I went to uni and honestly that path has improved my life in so many ways outside of just the degree.
I have often thought about how my life would have turned out if I’d gone into a trade rather than uni, and I’m sure financially I would still be doing alright, but I don’t think I would have had the same experiences, friends, and life lessons, and I think I might be worse off for that…
Someone brought up an interesting point in another thread, aren’t EU students coming in now being made to pay their own fees than having the same access to funding what native students have?
Scotland’s greatest export is our educated people, it’s not all about the budgets but even if it was if more tuition fees are the solution then why do we see English uni’s with deficits and budget problems? going even further there’s colleges in the US with the same issues and they are charging eyewatering amounts.
The free tuition made me from someone who could barely keep a job to a respected professional who has paid (and will be paying for decades) quite a chunky bit of tax. By all means have some bars in place to ensure people need to give back something, perhaps by working here but removing it entirely would be like shooting your own foot off to lose weight.
It’ll work in the short term.
Needs to be kept free, but the number of people going to university needs to be reduced. In all honesty, about 15-20% of the population at most should be going to university, with universities adjusting budgets and staffing levels to suit.
There are so many pointless degrees and so much wasted investment in higher education. I know people with art degrees who are working in pubs and as postmen, people with business related degrees working in Dominos etc. It’s nothing more than a waste of time, effort, and money in many cases.
Need to focus on strategically important education assets (life sciences, engineering, comp sci) and trim a lot of fluff.
There’s a whole range of issues at play here. Universities have badly managed their finances because they boldly assumed that foreign students could always be milked as much as they have been – that was never going to last forever as foreign universities improve their offers to prospective students, and the stupidity of Brexit accelerated that decline. It’s also true that access to tertiary education for those who benefit from it is a strategic public good and universities know that, hence why they’ve played loose with finances – they’re confident that Government will bail them out to support that strategic good, and they’re usually right.
At a time when everything is stretched, though, I really do have to ask whether free tuition at no cost to the individual involved is ideal. It’s an objective fact that university massively improves your earning potential, as well as being required for strategic sectors like health. I do think there’s a question of why taxpayers should fund someone to train for a six figure salary at Deloitte to the same extent they fund a doctor or a nurse.
I don’t have any easy answers to this. Access to education and acquiring knowledge are core values of mine. Right now I don’t know if it’s the best use of money when there are alternatives which, yes, impose a cost on the student once they earn a certain salary but don’t bar access to education.
It’s the principle of equal opportunity that seals it for me. What I find frustrating is the increasing costs of this education. Universities are one of the richest institutions in the country.
The main cause of the decline of the higher education sector is the UK Government’s severe limiting of foreign students which financed the universities/colleges etc. While these controls are in place the higher education institutions will always be lacking proper funding.
Maybe a means tested graduate tax would be a good way to secure access to higher education for future generations into the future. If you benefit from free higher education and that increases your earning potential greatly, you should be happy to help ensure that opportunity is open to those coming after you.
I know I’d be willing to pay a bit more tax for this once I graduate.
I fucked my first year at Uni. Did a year in a course that was just so wrong for me. I was able to change uni and course and ended up getting a first. Without free tuition that just wouldn’t have been possible for me and I’d either have just dropped out in debt or powered through a course I hated.
I can’t deprive future generations of something that was genuinely life changing for me.
Rejoin the EU and this funding crisis goes away. Free unis were essentially subsidised by foreign students paying through the nose, but Brexit put up a massive barrier there. I know someone who’s worked in uni admissions, and they basically took any foreign student no questions asked, because they bring in so much money.
I’m suspicious of this reported split.
Fees are an ideological choice taken by the Tory-Lib-Dem pact of 2010. Many countries, including Scotland, choose not to exploit such a mechanism to provide tertiary education.
Any assumption that they are “natural” or “just” is taking the ideological choice of another nation’s funding decisions as somehow correct over that of Scotland and many other countries.
Please don’t fall into that trap.
Would love to see the demographics on that one.
paid for by the taxpayer you mean, not free
They should review what courses need to be paid and which ones should be free. Free up STEM or particularly Medicine but have something like pop culture paid.
It shouldn’t be tuition fees should be a graduate tax (you know like we had prior to the SNP getting in)
More progressive, ie rich folk can’t just pay off their loan and avoid their tax.
Better funding
Probably less of a psychological barrier that current fees (which are just a tax in all but name)
It’s maddening that we don’t already operate on this system and completely down to politics, Tony Blair didn’t want new tax headlines and the SNP want to appear as if they’re really progressive by making it “free”.
We should never remove it, and anyone who wants it removed is a genuine cunt.
Tuition fees are not really a fee. They are essentially a delayed graduate tax.
I’d have less opposition to them if they were applied across all graduates – including those who got their education fully subsidised before they were introduced and then voted for parties who explicitly planned to introduce fees, cancel student support, or increase fees.
The current tuition fee is not “free” in the UK. It is a loan that has exploitative interest rates that outpace inflation and wage growth such that they can never be paid off. In short, it’s a graduate tax dressed up as something appealing to voters, which is deceptive.
Despite that, one thing we can all agree on is that the system needs reform. That the Scots are split on this shows that the people aren’t sure which way it needs reformation, however.
We propose directly subsidizing education (giving students a loan) but not making them pay it directly back as an individual. Instead, this subsidy will be funded by comprehensive taxation plans, that are punitive to the wealthy (the wealthy pay more)
This allows for society to carry the burden of funding education colectively, rather than forcing individuals to carry the burden of funding their own education.
To the people who don’t like the current system of free education; we regret to inform you that the thing you’re angry at isn’t truly free education.
How many Scottish voters are split over free tuition? I’m sure the majority would want to retain free tuition. I often feel these type of articles are there to float the idea of scrapping free tuition rather than describing the supposed dilemma voters face.
Taking away free education from the people will never be the right answer.
40 comments
Not sure what the answer is but without more funding the sector is going to decline. Tuition Fees go against the grain with me, but that means increased state funding.
It was nice while it lasted.
If we’re taking money from the most vulnerable then it’s only fair tarquins mummy and daddy should pay to send their kid to uni, or at least keep vital degrees free ie medicine, because how marine biologists do we actually need
It wasn’t that long ago I was heavily downvoted on this sub for saying the snp were likely kicking the can down the road to whoever comes in after them with this growing to be a bigger issue.
We need to assess which courses count as degrees.
I done events management at degree level which could have absolutely been a college course with less funding and a lower cost.
Create a level above hnd for these courses and stop allowing lecturers to set their prices.
I can’t in good conscience support removing this from other people when the tuition fees being paid was the only reason someone from my background could manage a University education.
One of the key things here is that we’ve built the education sector around everyone in Scotland going to Uni, so if you scrap free tuition then people from poorer sectors don’t apply and education STILL ends up in the toilet.
There’s a lot going on with education right now. One of the key problems is that if industries collapse, as they have, they can’t pay for research. Tuition fees cover about 50% of the cost of education, and Unis rely on secondary income streams like research funding to pay for it, so that’s been a hit too – pump money jnto rejuvenating engineering and medical research and we’ll claw some of that back.
Another issue is that the tuition fee is only fixed for undergrad. Post grad courses can charge a more realistic fee, so undergrad education is just getting less and less support in favour of postgrad. I’m in a position where our undergrad is overly specialised and its looking increasingly like we’ll end up watering it down and putting all the “good” teaching in a postgrad.
I’d support raising tuition fees to cover more of the education, so undergrad courses are less of an afterthought, and swapping free education for a means-tested grant scheme, meaning that kids from low-or-no income households get free undergrad education while rich kids pay the full amount… but I don’t honestly know if it would change anything. There’s a chance that if we did this AND raised tuition fees, between the higher grant costs and the cost of a means-testing system we end up paying out just as much from the government coffers.
It’s just hella complicated. I don’t think there’s a simple answer to it.
The UK tightening of student visas has contributed to a big drop off in the income for universities. Dundee saw their numbers dropping by over 25%.
Education should be a right, not a privilege. Education plays a crucial role in fostering critical thinking. Without it, we’re just a bunch of fucking bams. Reform-voting bams.
It really should be reviewed degree by degree. Nursing – free tuition. Drama – You pay for it. STEM – free. Gender Studies – you pay for it. Anything that is a luxury and isn’t vital, the individual should pay for. Anything that will benefit those around you, the government should support.
It’s depressing that journos just go with press releases. Yes it’s true home students are subsidised by international fee paying students. However the fees the unis raked in over the last 5 years resulted in a huge surplus so that new buildings and a large number of additional staff could be hired. Been discussed here earlier for Edi but it’s the general picture I reckon. Increase the critical mass of staff and presto the uni will have a noble prize winner in no time…
Canadian here – educated populations do better than uneducated ones. Ensure that the money is not going to diploma mills and invest in your kids. They might be grateful (someday)
I think the answer to this question is not a moral one but an economic one. I went to uni in London and I still have a 70k+ debt. But I’m not paying a penny of it back and it’s going to get written off in a decade with no ill effects on me. Many in our generation are in the same boat. Ultimately the question is whether these thousands of unpaid debts are actually costing the taxpayer more or less money than simply paying for the cost of tuition outright.
I used to think that raising the cost of tuition back in 2012 was idiotic – but I think the reality is somewhere buried in a balance sheet. Ultimately, if you’re not wealthy and have to be supported by a large student loan to receive a university education, you are under no obligation to ever pay it back unless you become financially stable enough to.
What I would worry about is bringing in fees, and therefore tuition loans, could unlock the door to future changes to this lack of repayment obligation, which IMO is far more dangerous and detrimental than the existence of the fees themselves. I think we can all agree that a US-style system, where education can leave people financially crippled for the rest of their lives, would be an awful thing to see in the UK.
There is more to lose from putting a financial barrier in the way of education than there is to gain.
More doctors, engineers, actors, composers, etc. many of whom may have been priced out of higher education.
Even if you didn’t directly benefit from higher education yourself, you’ve almost certainly inadvertently benefitted from it.
I will always be happy to advocate for free tuition as it’s provided me opportunities I wouldn’t have had if I had to pay. Scrapping this would be political suicide for whoever dared to do it, particularly with the younger voting base. Brexit yet again inflicting serious damage to something that worked well.
Right now the situation doesn’t work for anyone except rich kids. Universities don’t have enough funding, in Scotland or England. Caps on number of places means entry requirements are going up while students are struggling to cover all their living costs. Plus, our primary and secondary schools are struggling, with thousands of kids leaving school without nat5 maths. Whole system needs reform
The current situation is entirely the making of the UK government. First they reduce funding and tell universities to bring in tuition fees. They then cap these fees, meaning with time they bring in less and less revenue for universities. The answer was to encourage more international students, whose higher fees would ‘subsidise’ the loss made on home students.
When this, inevitably, increased immigration, the government freaked out, and told universities they needed to prioritise home students. But because of the cap, no amount of home students would fill the yawning gap in finances.
The only answer now, as we’re seeing, is aggressive cuts. But we shouldn’t be upset at the universities for having to do that – they have simply done what successive governments have asked them to do.
The current situation is entirely the making of the UK government. First they reduce funding and tell universities to bring in tuition fees. They then cap these fees, meaning with time they bring in less and less revenue for universities. The answer was to encourage more international students, whose higher fees would ‘subsidise’ the loss made on home students.
When this, inevitably, increased immigration, the government freaked out, and told universities they needed to prioritise home students. But because of the cap, no amount of home students would fill the yawning gap in finances.
The only answer now, as we’re seeing, is aggressive cuts. But we shouldn’t be upset at the universities for having to do that – they have simply done what successive governments have asked them to do. It’s depressing, but Scotland’s free tuition is likely unsustainable in the very near future if there isn’t UK-wide changes to how universities are funded.
Free tuition was really one of the primary reasons I went to uni and honestly that path has improved my life in so many ways outside of just the degree.
I have often thought about how my life would have turned out if I’d gone into a trade rather than uni, and I’m sure financially I would still be doing alright, but I don’t think I would have had the same experiences, friends, and life lessons, and I think I might be worse off for that…
Someone brought up an interesting point in another thread, aren’t EU students coming in now being made to pay their own fees than having the same access to funding what native students have?
Scotland’s greatest export is our educated people, it’s not all about the budgets but even if it was if more tuition fees are the solution then why do we see English uni’s with deficits and budget problems? going even further there’s colleges in the US with the same issues and they are charging eyewatering amounts.
The free tuition made me from someone who could barely keep a job to a respected professional who has paid (and will be paying for decades) quite a chunky bit of tax. By all means have some bars in place to ensure people need to give back something, perhaps by working here but removing it entirely would be like shooting your own foot off to lose weight.
It’ll work in the short term.
Needs to be kept free, but the number of people going to university needs to be reduced. In all honesty, about 15-20% of the population at most should be going to university, with universities adjusting budgets and staffing levels to suit.
There are so many pointless degrees and so much wasted investment in higher education. I know people with art degrees who are working in pubs and as postmen, people with business related degrees working in Dominos etc. It’s nothing more than a waste of time, effort, and money in many cases.
Need to focus on strategically important education assets (life sciences, engineering, comp sci) and trim a lot of fluff.
There’s a whole range of issues at play here. Universities have badly managed their finances because they boldly assumed that foreign students could always be milked as much as they have been – that was never going to last forever as foreign universities improve their offers to prospective students, and the stupidity of Brexit accelerated that decline. It’s also true that access to tertiary education for those who benefit from it is a strategic public good and universities know that, hence why they’ve played loose with finances – they’re confident that Government will bail them out to support that strategic good, and they’re usually right.
At a time when everything is stretched, though, I really do have to ask whether free tuition at no cost to the individual involved is ideal. It’s an objective fact that university massively improves your earning potential, as well as being required for strategic sectors like health. I do think there’s a question of why taxpayers should fund someone to train for a six figure salary at Deloitte to the same extent they fund a doctor or a nurse.
I don’t have any easy answers to this. Access to education and acquiring knowledge are core values of mine. Right now I don’t know if it’s the best use of money when there are alternatives which, yes, impose a cost on the student once they earn a certain salary but don’t bar access to education.
It’s the principle of equal opportunity that seals it for me. What I find frustrating is the increasing costs of this education. Universities are one of the richest institutions in the country.
The main cause of the decline of the higher education sector is the UK Government’s severe limiting of foreign students which financed the universities/colleges etc. While these controls are in place the higher education institutions will always be lacking proper funding.
Maybe a means tested graduate tax would be a good way to secure access to higher education for future generations into the future. If you benefit from free higher education and that increases your earning potential greatly, you should be happy to help ensure that opportunity is open to those coming after you.
I know I’d be willing to pay a bit more tax for this once I graduate.
I fucked my first year at Uni. Did a year in a course that was just so wrong for me. I was able to change uni and course and ended up getting a first. Without free tuition that just wouldn’t have been possible for me and I’d either have just dropped out in debt or powered through a course I hated.
I can’t deprive future generations of something that was genuinely life changing for me.
Rejoin the EU and this funding crisis goes away. Free unis were essentially subsidised by foreign students paying through the nose, but Brexit put up a massive barrier there. I know someone who’s worked in uni admissions, and they basically took any foreign student no questions asked, because they bring in so much money.
I’m suspicious of this reported split.
Fees are an ideological choice taken by the Tory-Lib-Dem pact of 2010. Many countries, including Scotland, choose not to exploit such a mechanism to provide tertiary education.
Any assumption that they are “natural” or “just” is taking the ideological choice of another nation’s funding decisions as somehow correct over that of Scotland and many other countries.
Please don’t fall into that trap.
Would love to see the demographics on that one.
paid for by the taxpayer you mean, not free
They should review what courses need to be paid and which ones should be free. Free up STEM or particularly Medicine but have something like pop culture paid.
It shouldn’t be tuition fees should be a graduate tax (you know like we had prior to the SNP getting in)
More progressive, ie rich folk can’t just pay off their loan and avoid their tax.
Better funding
Probably less of a psychological barrier that current fees (which are just a tax in all but name)
It’s maddening that we don’t already operate on this system and completely down to politics, Tony Blair didn’t want new tax headlines and the SNP want to appear as if they’re really progressive by making it “free”.
We should never remove it, and anyone who wants it removed is a genuine cunt.
Tuition fees are not really a fee. They are essentially a delayed graduate tax.
I’d have less opposition to them if they were applied across all graduates – including those who got their education fully subsidised before they were introduced and then voted for parties who explicitly planned to introduce fees, cancel student support, or increase fees.
The current tuition fee is not “free” in the UK. It is a loan that has exploitative interest rates that outpace inflation and wage growth such that they can never be paid off. In short, it’s a graduate tax dressed up as something appealing to voters, which is deceptive.
Despite that, one thing we can all agree on is that the system needs reform. That the Scots are split on this shows that the people aren’t sure which way it needs reformation, however.
We propose directly subsidizing education (giving students a loan) but not making them pay it directly back as an individual. Instead, this subsidy will be funded by comprehensive taxation plans, that are punitive to the wealthy (the wealthy pay more)
This allows for society to carry the burden of funding education colectively, rather than forcing individuals to carry the burden of funding their own education.
To the people who don’t like the current system of free education; we regret to inform you that the thing you’re angry at isn’t truly free education.
Find out more about our political beliefs here:
Productiv
https://gofile.io/d/hw9c7G
How many Scottish voters are split over free tuition? I’m sure the majority would want to retain free tuition. I often feel these type of articles are there to float the idea of scrapping free tuition rather than describing the supposed dilemma voters face.
Taking away free education from the people will never be the right answer.
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