The decision of Scottish universities to charge students is not made at Westminster but At Holyrood.
Eh, no. English students are funded by Student Finance England. The decisions to impose and then to increase fees were all made at Westminster.
Of course, Scotland could unilaterally choose to support english students at scotland’s cost. But why, if England won’t? Should we pay for English students studying in England too? What other English services do you think Scotland be paying for?
If you’re unhappy about Westminster imposing tuition fees, take it up with them.
(b) The close geographic and cultural ties make it easy for English students to study in Scotland so the policy difference can make it harder for Scots students to find places.
Not really; The SFC funds places for scottish students on a use-em-or-lose-em basis via the outcome agreeements so even the more in-demand unis like us still want to fill every place that we can with scottish students. We overshoot most years- conversion is an art not a science and we’d rather have to fund a few scottish students ourselves, than fail to fill the places- and the same’s true across the industry, I’ve not seen more recent numbers but in 13-14 every scottish funded place was taken, and more. (it’s something like 125000 core places funded, plus an extra 5000 targeted additional funded places, and 140000 filled)
Basically, the 2 groups of students don’t directly compete for places. The major difference is that scottish recruitment is essentially capped by funded places whereas rest-of-world recruitment is essentially capped by the number of seats remaining after that, and the number of quality applicants. This leads to some pretty odd situations tbf but it absolutely does not mean that English students take places from Scottish.
