The Principal of the University of Aberdeen says the way higher education is funded in Scotland must be reconsidered.
Professor George Boyne has revealed that a collapse in the number of international students, along with a steady decline in government funding, has plunged Aberdeen into deficit, leading to its annual report this year warning that the university’s future was “in significant doubt.”
A programme of voluntary redundancies has steadied its finances, but Prof Boyne believes the policy on free tuition should be reviewed as part of a wider funding programme for higher education in Scotland.
Two other university bosses — Sir Peter Mathieson, of Edinburgh University, and Sir Paul Grice, of the city’s Queen Margaret University — have urged the government to reconsider the policy, despite Alex Salmond’s pledge when he was first minister that “the rocks would melt with the sun” before free tuition was scrapped.
Prof Boyne has backed the call by his peers in an interview with The Times.
He said: “We’ve gone from crunch to crisis and it is now urgent - the crisis has to be addressed in some way, because the only other alternative is for the sector to shrink, and that’s a tragedy.”
Prof Boyne said a fair funding system should take into account the future earning potential of a student. At present English students take out loans that are intended to be paid back as soon as they earn enough, which the principal says needs to be part of the debate in Scotland.
“I think [free tuition] is the wrong place to start, although understandably that’s where the political discussion finally goes,” he said.
“We should start with looking at the outcomes we want to achieve — what do we want from higher education as a nation? What is it we want our universities to be achieving for the social, economic and collective good? — and then work backwards from that to how we should fund them in order to be able to achieve those outcomes."
Click here to read the full interview.