Rachel Hamada looks at what a virtual funding freeze will mean for Scottish universities
If the last few weeks’ feuding over the fate of Scotland’s university funding has revealed anything, it is that higher education is not much of a populist issue. This in itself says something about the lack of connection that many of the Scottish public feel for the institutions that have done so much to shape Scotland’s historical and economic development. Yet Scotland is so used to losing at everything (well, at least until the European Championship qualifiers) that maybe it’s time to recognise where our real successes lie. for example, in the league table of the world’s top 200 universities, Scotland has five entries – more per head of population than anywhere else in the world. Basically, our brains outperform our brawn, and in the new global economy, that’s a very good thing
But as things stand, universities themselves are rarely vote-winners or losers as, if voters use them at all, it will tend to be once in a lifetime. More immediate subjects such as healthcare, hospital provision and crime tend to get the average voter far more het up. Most politicians will be well aware of this. Nonetheless, many observers were shocked at the low levels of investment committed by the Government to universities from 2008-11.
Although the Government is reported to have been more conciliatory behind the scenes about the disappointing level of funding, in public it has been all bombast and number spinning. Its attempt to spin an effective freeze on university investment into ‘universities being given half the money that they asked for’ seemed, to many, a bit rich, precisely because of the SNP’s own public frustration at Westminster’s spinning of Scotland’s spending review settlement. for a Government that has so far tended to deal in the currency of honesty, it seemed a bit disingenuous. As one insider says, “if you spin the numbers, they might come back and bite you”.
So what does it all mean? for now, the Government and universities seem to have reached an uneasy truce, and the latter group is keen to stress that it is not saying that the cash it has been allocated will mean that the sky will fall in over the next three years – or that there will be “tumbleweed and dead bodies in university cafeterias”. It also doesn’t want to scare away students with any talk of crisis. What it is instead arguing is that investment in higher education would have meant expansion and growth, in accordance with the Government’s avowed top-line strategy of sustainable economic growth.
The case seems far from complicated. Scottish universities already set a high standard, which attracts international students and research and teaching talent, which, in turn, propels us up the international rankings. It’s a virtuous circle that would be dangerous to disrupt. University research and development is also top quality, offers strong potential for economic growth, is boosted by collaborative initiatives such as research pooling, and is particularly significant in the absence of Scottish commercial research and development.
Lastly, Scottish universities turn out high-skilled students, which are the grist that the Scottish economic mill needs if we are to be a successful value-added economy. This brings us to the perennial “too many graduates” debate. It is common to hear claims that Scotland is churning out too many graduates with pointless degrees, or from worthless universities. Is there any substance to this argument?
Taking the debate point by point, are high participation rates, for their own sake, worth anything? Yes, argues Universities Scotland, because university education gives people problem-solving, lateral thinking and communication skills that they take on into their future careers for the benefit of the companies and organisations they go on to work for. These are exactly the kind of general skills that a rapidly changing global marketplace demands. Universities Scotland also points to the “arc of prosperity”, countries such as Finland, where participation rates are pushing 70 per cent, substantially higher than Scotland’s.
What’s more, a key element in Ireland’s successful economic strategy, which Scotland is so keen to emulate as a “Celtic Lion”, was investment in higher education – although Ireland at that time had access to European funds that we do not. Studies also seem to show a correlation between people who have been through higher education and their levels of productivity.
What about students who do oftderided degrees such as “media studies” at former polytechnics? Often the butt of humour, is this justified? The point of university, says Universities Scotland, is that you may well not end up working in the specialised field of your degree, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t acquire versatile skills that translate into a multitude of future jobs. Rather than all being failed TV presenters, many go on to successful communications jobs, or indeed other fields.
Why does the “too many graduates” idea persist in Scotland then? According to Universities Scotland, it is partly an Anglo-Saxon mindset. Compared with countries in mainland Europe, such as France, the UK has a high anti-intellectual element, which it has been able to get away with economically because of the success of the City of London, often the battleground of the Essex Boy and yob trader. Scotland now has the remnants of a whole-UK media in an economy that is actually heavily devolved and far more reliant on intellectual capital than the UK economy has historically been.
Add to this a substantial generational effect – as participation rates have gone up, middle-aged people started to feel aggrieved because they had been to university previously and felt part of an elite, and didn’t want to see “just anybody” getting into university. Or alternatively, they didn’t go and feel it didn’t do them any harm. People may ask why a job they started out in has suddenly become a graduate job, but it may be because the job now requires substantial computer literacy – many roles now require greater flexibility and breadth of skills than they ever did previously.
So the case for universities seems clear. How then could the SNP make the university sector a sacrificial lamb? Back in 2004, then SNP leader John Swinney was scathing about what he said was the Labour/Lib Dem Government’s failure to address higher education funding problems in the light of the introduction of top-up fees in English universities. He said: “Without the introduction of top-up fees, England is still on course to overtake Scotland in university funding by 2006. “Top-up fees will give an instant funding advantage to universities south of the Border
Top-up fees will give an instant funding advantage to universities south of the Border 
. What will follow will be a draining of Scotland’s academic resources and Scotland’s universities put to the financial sword.”
Quite a reversal between 2004 and 2007. Three years may be a long time in politics, but Scottish universities are in no easier position in relation to their English counterparts than they were back then. What went wrong? With a Budget settlement that was by most measures pretty tight, something was going to have to give – but given the SNP’s expressed dedication to sustainable economic growth, universities were not an expected target. Words from politicians and those in the higher education sector to express their reaction to the announcement include “shock”, “fury”, “disappointment”, “anger” and “disbelief”. First Minister Alex Salmond was said to be extremely unhappy at the reaction that the Government’s university funding settlement got – surely he can’t have been that surprised?
Did the universities fail to lobby effectively enough? They presented much the same kind of case to the Government as they have for previous spending reviews, although this time it was the “most thorough and well researched case we’ve ever put forward”. Typically for academics, and understandably, they relied mainly on evidence to state their case, rather than schmoozing and PR tactics. Some of the older universities, in particular, may even have had a whiff of complacency about them, assuming they would just get the requested cash “because we’re worth it”. The SNP Government is pursuing a broadly popular agenda – perhaps this conventional evidence-based approach just wasn’t enough to win the money in a highly competitive landscape of policy priorities.
What sounds like a potentially quite crass decision by the SNP may have actually been made on a more complex basis, however. Economist Jeremy Peat, a strong supporter of higher education in the main, argues that it is actually “not a no-brainer that universities should get a larger slice of the cake”. “The Budget is constrained, and there are a huge amount of factors already determined… Clearly to achieve economic growth one needs a highly skilled and motivated labour force and a high degree of innovation – but neither of these are 100 per cent correlated with the university sector. for the labour force we need to get rid of the tail of low achievers as well as focusing on the top of the tree.
“With innovation we face a conundrum. Universities continue to deliver patents and high quality research results but business research is still at a low level, and seems to be a lack of read-across into high-value innovative products in the business sector. The answer is not to just pump out more research, but to work out why this is happening.”
Tough choices are going to have to be made, Peat said. “Universities and Government will have to look at priorities in terms of what type of high-skilled workers are needed, both specific and generic skills. We must not give equal priority to all areas of output. Scarce resources are a fact of life everywhere, and increasingly in Scotland.”
What’s clear is that the Government’s decision to deny universities most of the funds they asked for has opened up an important debate – not just about the intrinsic value of universities and the work they do, but also about how they are funded. The SNP’s commitment to free education makes it look unlikely that it will ever support the charging of fees, and the Liberal Democrats would not countenance such a move. That makes the choice of alternatives very limited. The future of the public funding of universities has started to look less certain than ever before, but no other revenue streams are currently on the table. Some have mooted the idea of a graduate tax, but again, the weight put by the SNP on the debt problems faced by graduates make this move look improbable.
The Tories have been pushing for some time for a full higher education funding review. Universities Scotland are worried that this would take a long time to carry out and then just end up concluding that either public funding or tuition fees was the answer. Given that neither solution looks like a winner at the moment, this could end up being wasted energy.
However, the universities body is broadly supportive of the idea of a joint thinking exercise on universities. This has now been confirmed, in the shape of a high-level Joint future Thinking Taskforce that will conclude around springtime next year. The idea is that this group will look at university education from basic philosophical principles, such as what universities should be for and what entitlement to university should be, as well as the more adversarial subject of funding. It will also look at the nature and scale of what Scottish higher education is going to need in the future, for example, the period between 2017 and 2027, then develop a strategy for getting there. That’s a lot to get through in a short time – is it really viable? Opposition MSPs have said it looks more like a “political fix” than a genuine thinking exercise.
Nonetheless there is some common sense in looking at the fundamental concepts behind universities, and what they mean to Scotland and its public. Universities have been part of the grain of Scottish life for so long that rarely do we question their purpose – except for the post-92 universities, who often have to take flak for not being “academic” enough.
What is university? What does it mean objectively, what does it mean to its staff and students, and what does it mean to Scotland as a whole? It is a place of higher education, where young people’s minds are developed and expanded. It’s a place where students go to booze, smoke dope and pin interchangeable Bob Marley/Che Guevara/Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s posters on their walls. It’s a place where knowledge is acquired. It’s a place where research is carried out and a hotbed of invention. It’s a place where career academics quarrel over minutiae of arguments that would mean nothing to the average person on the street.
It’s a place where history is conserved and continued through future generations.It’s a place where young people can escape protective parents and learn to stand on their own two feet. It’s a place where older people can come to study useful or esoteric subjects they haven’t had the chance to study before. It’s a place where upper-class types sit around eating roast swan and quaffing port. It’s a place that allows people from the most deprived backgrounds to achieve the ultimate in learning and thinking. It’s all those things and more.
But what do we want it to be in the future? It’s an important ‘national conversation’ to have, and should be at a leisurely enough pace to allow time for proper discussion, but swift enough to allow universities to flourish in the right direction for Scotland. for now, universities are taking a cautious tack, not wanting to act too aggressively and alienate the Government. University principals are reluctant to speak on the record. Universities Scotland says it will do the best it can to mitigate the circumstances in which the universities find themselves, and the harshest that their language gets – on the record at least – is talking of a “missed opportunity”. It also points out that a likely 5 per cent funding gap is going to open up between Scottish and English universities, which might not represent utter disaster over three years but represents the start of a worrying trend. Universities have been given sympathy behind closed doors and have been promised utmost consideration when there’s any end-of-year money going. It’s the “uneasy truce” in action.
Clearly, whether you are cynical about or sympathetic to the Government’s intentions on universities, a can of worms has been opened, and awareness has been raised that there are issues to be resolved that go far beyond the “universities are fantastic and should be funded generously” and “universities are rolling in money and don’t need our cash” dichotomy. The hope is that there is enough ambition around the joint thinking exercise to plot a way forward for Scottish universities that will benefit all.
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