Scotland’s famed universities are now a critically endangered species thanks to SNP policy, with the University of Dundee providing a prime – and tragic – example.
Yes, there are several factors that are contributing to the institution’s current difficulties.
Changes to UK immigration rules have led to a drop in international student numbers.
In 2022/23, foreign students contributed as much as £73million to the university’s coffers, but that vital international enrolment has declined since.
Equally, there has clearly been mismanagement at the top of the university, which has understandably caused consternation among students and staff.
The most egregious example of this was the apparent profligacy of former principal Professor Iain Gillespie, whom The Courier revealed was charging the cash-strapped university for high-end international business trips.
Even putting that to one side, it seems extraordinary that the wider university management allowed such a precarious financial position to develop.
Yet the role of the SNP government in both fermenting this crisis and failing to respond to it has, so far, largely gone unnoticed.
Cash cow curtailed
The reality is that the nationalists’ policy of “universal”, “free” tuition is the biggest contributor to the University of Dundee’s current malaise.
Under the current arrangements, the Scottish Government is responsible for compensating universities for the costs of educating Scottish students in lieu of charging them fees.
The problem is this funding grant from the Scottish Government has declined by almost a fifth in real terms since 2014, with the most severe reductions coming in the last few years.
Naturally, universities including Dundee have sought to cover that shortfall with an increasing reliance on international students, who can be charged as much as £52,000 a year to study some courses.
But, as we have seen, changes to immigration arrangements have largely curtailed that cash cow.
Nationalists therefore may be inclined to blame the UK Government for the financial crisis, but that ignores the reality – it is their policies that are the root cause.
Certainly, while financial sustainability may be at its most acute and obvious in Dundee, it is far from unique, with higher education institutions across the country at risk of major cuts or, increasingly, closure entirely.
Universities Scotland, the sector’s representative body, recently warned that a “decade-long near freeze in funding undergraduate education for home students” had left higher education institutions in an “unsustainable” position.
The turmoil at the University of Dundee should therefore be a wake-up call for SNP ministers – and other parties – on the need to reform the existing funding arrangements for higher education.
Without such changes, the University of Dundee may be one of the first universities in Scotland to face a major shortfall, but it will not be the last.
The free tuition debate
Of course, such changes are unlikely.
Ahead of devolved elections next year, opposition parties seem reluctant to grab the particularly thorny thistle of “free” tuition, while a party whose leader once declared that the “rocks would melt with the sun” before he introduced tuition fees seems unlikely to act, either.
Indeed, while staff and students from the University of Dundee gathered to fight for their future outside the Scottish Parliament this week, the SNP’s higher education minister Graeme Dey was spotted going to the canteen for lunch – a bad omen for action, if ever there was one.
Equally, such a reform – though an urgent necessity – will not help the students and staff at the university today, who continue to face an immediate and uncertain future.
The fact is that the University of Dundee is simply too valuable to the city, the region and the country to be allowed to fail, and the Scottish Government must now intervene directly to rescue it from its current predicament, whether via a loan from the Scottish Funding Council or a more direct intervention.
The economic case for such a move is clear.
The university contributes almost half a billion pounds to Tayside’s GDP and is responsible for sustaining thousands of jobs.
Should it be allowed to collapse, or even diminish, the cost in terms of growth and livelihoods would be severe.
‘Crisis largely of SNP’s own making’
Certainly, were the university a shipyard or a powerplant, the Scottish Government would have no qualms about intervening to protect it.
If it does not do so in this case, it can only be because to do so would be to recognise and admit the disastrous consequences of its own “free” tuition policy.
Ultimately, this is a funding crisis largely of the SNP’s own making, and it is not right that students and staff should pay the price for the nationalists’ ideological dogmatism.
With devolved elections barely a year away, voters will rightly never forgive the SNP if it allows one of Scotland’s great institutions to fail.
For the sake of students and staff – and simple good sense – the Scottish Government must act now.
Conversation