Time to pay the piper

The clock is ticking on the future of higher education in Scotland. The democratic intellect is on borrowed time. In less than a month John Swinney, the Scottish finance secretary, must decide whether or not to restore tuition fees in Scotland. If he does, it will be the end of a century old tradition of free and open access to Scottish universities.
  
Do not be misled by the promise, made by the SNP education secretary Michael Russell, not to introduce 'up-front fees'. No one is talking about 'up-front fees' anymore, even in England, where increased fees will be paid through the student loan system after graduation. It is almost inevitable that something like this is going to be proposed in Scotland.
  
Prominent figures like Lord Sutherland, the former principal of Edinburgh University, have been openly calling for fees to be restored. The Scottish universities and even the NUS in Scotland appear to have accepted that the universal principle is dead, and that there is no alternative but to accept a 'graduate contribution' to pay for tuition.
  
The Browne Report on university funding in England, which the coalition government intends to implement, will have a devastating impact on Scottish higher education. Coupled with the 40% cut in university teaching in George Osborne’s spending review, it represents the effective retreat of the state from university funding in areas other than science and engineering.
    
Not only will this mean students emerging from years of study burdened by mortgage-sized debt, but it could fundamentally change the entire character of universities north and south of the border, turning many into the equivalent of fee-paying private schools. What Lord Browne envisages is a market in higher education. Elite universities would be able to charge higher fees because students, or their parents, will be willing to pay. The model is taken direct from America, where Ivy League universities like Harvard and Yale can and do charge anything up to $50,000 a year for tuition.
  
Faced with outrage from staff and students, UK universities minister David Willetts is hinting that he may keep the cap at £7,000 for the time being. But even at that level, the Scottish government, with its funding slashed, will find it almost impossible to compensate Scottish universities for the shortfall in fee income. The money will simply not be there in the Barnett Formula which calculates Scottish public funding.
  
This will finally bury the system of free higher education established half a century ago by the Robbins Report of 1963. Lord Robbins argued for all students to be free to go to any university on the basis of their ability to learn, not their ability to pay. Not only was this seen as morally preferable to privatised education, it was seen as the best way to ensure that able individuals from poor backgrounds would make the choice of going to university in the first place.    

I am a product of that university expansion. When I attended Edinburgh University in the 1970s, not only were my tuition fees paid, but I also received a grant that was more than enough to live on. In those far-off days students could even claim social security benefits in the vacations. The argument was that students were losing four years of earnings and should not be saddled with debt for studying for a degree.
   
All that ended when Labour politicians like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, who also benefited from free higher education, introduced top up fees in 2004 after promising in their election manifesto that they would not. They argued that students could afford to pay £3,000 fees. But it was the thin end of the wedge.
   
The Browne report is a logical progression from their move to introduce variable fees. Labour set up the commission under the chairmanship of the former head of BP, Lord Browne, so they can hardly be surprised at the recommendation. The intention is to place the burden of paying for higher education on the student rather than the state.

Students are being told that this is fair because they stand to earn more than £100,000 more during their working lives than non-graduates. That is a very poor deal. A hundred grand works out at about ten quid a week over a lifetime's worth of earnings. Hardly a justification for giving up four years of earnings and a debt of £50,000.  

Yet, the case for tax-funded higher education is far stronger today, when more than half of Scottish school-leavers go on to university, than it was in my day when only 10 per cent of (mainly middle-class) students received free higher education.  

The Scottish Parliament abolished fees in 2000 arguing that it was incompatible with the Scottish tradition of higher education. The “democratic intellect” was a phrase coined by the academic George Davie in 1961 to describe the generalist ethos of Scottish higher education. The idea is that in Scotland education has always been seen as a social good, rather than a vehicle for individual career advancement. Education improved the intellectual capacity of the society, and therefore should be paid for collectively. It is a tradition that can be traced back to the Reformation and the parish schools which provided the foundation for Scotland’s educational democracy.

In 28 days that tradition is likely to come to an abrupt end.