English pay full price; EU goes Scot-free

Quite wonderfully (for them), Scottish students have free university education in Scotland. All EU students, in fact, can acquire a higher education free of charge in Scotland. All EU students, that is, except the non-Scottish British. In 2012, English, Welsh, and Northern Irish students will pay up to £9,000 for tuition that Scotland and the rest of the EU receives for free.

When written out like this, in plain English, the inequality and even the discrimination of this policy are surely plain to see. Yet to raise this question amongst peers is inevitably to be barraged with replies of “Scottish students have to pay for university in England, therefore English students should have to pay for university in Scotland.” EU law states that students from one EU country studying in another EU country should pay the same fees as a home student from that country. If I wanted (or was intelligent enough) to study at the Sorbonne, I would pay no more and no less than a French student.

This is why Scottish students pay for higher education in England. This is why Scottish students pay for higher education in France, Germany, or anywhere else in the EU. Since Alex Salmond has upheld his promise to maintain free university education in Scotland for home students, this is also why students from elsewhere in the EU benefit from a free education north of the border.

It should not be acceptable that English, Welsh, and Northern Irish students pay for university in Scotland. They are all members of an EU state too, are they not? The loophole that allows this absurd situation to occur comes from the fact that they are members of the same EU state as Scotland. Such discrimination is allowed within the UK because it is technically divided into different countries, while remaining one state in the eyes of the EU.

It is my understanding that Scotland does not yet have full fiscal autonomy from the rest of the UK. This means that non-Scottish British students, whose parents dutifully pay UK taxes that include Scotland in their distribution, are denied free higher education there. Meanwhile, other European students, whose parents pay nothing to the UK, are able to obtain this education for free. Approximately 16,000 European students attend university in Scotland, costing the taxpayer around £75 million each year.

Two such students are friends of mine: a Spanish girl and a German girl at St. Andrews. In fairness, although their tuition is free, they actually have not paid much less for their first year at university than I have, because their accommodation has cost them about £6,500 for the year. Mine has cost me £3,354, and with 2011’s tuition fees set at £3,375, I have only paid £229 more than they have.

Indeed, since off-campus accommodation in the town of St. Andrews is notoriously expensive (a cheap room costing at least £500 a month excluding bills, they tell me), they could eventually pay more for their university experience than me.

However, an English student studying in Scotland would have to pay tuition on top of the £6,500 accommodation bill. One year as an English student studying and living at St. Andrews therefore costs almost the same amount as a three year degree here at Warwick, if you lived at home.
In August 2011, prominent human rights lawyer Phil Shiner was planning to tackle the policy. He argued that the fee rise in Scotland for non-Scottish Brits contravened the European Convention on Human Rights, under which discrimination based on “national or social origin” is not allowed. After the hype, we heard almost nothing.

The SNP clarified that the policy had nothing to do with “national or social origin”, since eligibility for free tuition was assessed by residence, not race, and that was that. Yet another loophole authorizing the continuation of a largely ignored yet highly prejudicial policy.

The loophole must be challenged again, not as a human rights issue but as one of European law. Currently, the EU is forceful in preventing discrimination between EU states, while permitting it between countries in the same EU state. This is an oversight that must be addressed before the start of the 2012 academic year.