University in Scotland

[Watchagotch72]

I’m trying to get my head around the current situation regarding Uni applications / fee status / quotas for Scottish unis.

as I understand it the Scot gov funds a certain number of places at Scottish unis for ‘local’ (resident in Scotland) applicants, where they will effectively not pay any fees.

then there are ‘rUK’ places - students from the other home nations - where the fees are around £9,500 per year.

then there are international students, from everywhere else, who will pay up to £40k a year, depending on the course.

my question is: what happens to ‘local’ students who don’t get an offer for a ‘local’ place? Can they then join the ‘rUK’ student quota and pay the £9.5k per year fees?

Do most ‘local’ applicants get a ‘local’ place? What do they if they don’t?

The reasons you need parents with money (not necessarily 'rich') to study down south is that it removes the ability to live at or near home which a large percentage of Scottish students can if they live near a higher learning institution. We have several excellent universities and other well rated institutions.

@EvelynBeatrice That's true, thank you. I'm still locked into the "go away for uni" mindset which I know is changing!

Mmm … But most of the English / Welsh students who live away from home aren’t rich either.

There’s also a general feeling, perhaps more amongst degree educated parents, that ‘going away’ is an essential part of the experience that university provides.

It’s certainly a thing you don’t notice when you’re the one doing it - but we’ve been astonished at the myriad learning opportunities the young in the family have been confronted with outside of actual study.

Is going away to Uni really not a thing in Scotland, then?

There’s quite a big difference in the maintenance loan available to Scottish students vs England which will impact a student’s ability to study in England esp London.

Household Inc 34k, Scottish student can get a loan if £6k, England £8.3 for studying outside London, £11.2 studying in London. So parents will have to pay more to get their DC even up to the starting point of an English student. Yes they can get jobs but the level of loans will not even cover accommodation.

@ForbiddenColour That's an interesting point. At the high end, Scottish loans mean-testing doesn't have as many 'levels' as the English system, so a Scottish student someone from a household with total income over approximately £60k would get more than their English counterpart!

This is true but it was unexpected and accidental - applications from all demographics were so high that by the time they’d filed the spaces for flagged students (those with some indicator of deprivation) there were none left. It was unintentional and immediately seen as a problem, and Edinburgh are now much more careful about how the flagging is done to make sure it doesn’t happen again (I.e., tighter on what counts as eligible for a contextualised offer on oversubscribed courses).

Well but it’s called the index of multiple deprivation in recognition that a single factor (e.g., household income) doesn’t tell the whole story. I believe it’s generally agreed to be a better estimate of deprivation than most, though obviously there are still many anomalies.

There’s also evidence that attending a high school with high levels of deprivation significantly affects outcomes even if you come from a more affluent household.

Mine wanted to go away and we were happy to support that so they could have that experience

I don't think there is a general feeling. If someone wants to go to a university outwith Scotland it will be dependent on their family finances etc. Some will easily afford to do it and others will have to settle*

They do what students in the rest of UK do. They get a student loan (from SAAS) to cover their fees and pay it back over their working lives. I know several Scottish students who are doing this.

Sorry, I’m being thick. I’ve read the links and googled but the information seems ambiguous. So if my Scotland-resident DS chooses to go to an English uni, he can get a loan for the fees which works the same way as the English loans? ie paid back as it it were an additional level of tax? Is that just for tuition or is there a maintenance loan available too?

Yes SAAS provide student loans to cover fees for students studying undergraduate courses in rUK and Ireland. It starts getting paid back once the person is earning over a certain threshold. Details are on SAAS website. It's not dependent on parental income.
It's the maintenance loan that's means tested.

It’s very complicated isn’t it?

£1,800 per student per year seems incredibly low though, resurgissait for universities that are aiming to compete with the big ones in England. is it sustainable? To basically guarantee that every student who gets the grades, and wants to, can study for free in Scotland? No wonder the unis are getting as many international students in as possible.

I think there is a lot of scaremongering about the "lack" of places for Scottish students at Scottish Unis.

A friend has two kids, both at a good private school, living in a good area (so no "contextual offers" in play) who both have conditional acceptances to do medicine at the "ancient" Unis that are supposedly almost impossible to get into for Scots, if you believe everything you read.

I do realise that the plural of "anecdotes" is not "proof"

@PhotoDad agreed (though not if studying in London). I was trying to highlight the very quick taper in Scotland. The parental ‘contribution’ kicks in much earlier. The median income for U.K. households in the U.K. in 2022 was £34k.

My dd is going to uni this September. She got the required grades for all of her courses, however she was knocked back for one of her Strathclyde choices. She got an unconditional for the other.

The decline email cited huge no of applicants being the reason.

It seems that the £18k+ per year fees they can charge international students means that Scottish applicants are not really wanted. They are running a business after all and this is their funding model.

SIMD is not just about income, it's about access to transport, industry, further and higher education etc. So, rural areas can have a low SIMD based on this.

The annoying thing about this is a 4 year course becomes effectively a 6 year course and costs them £20k or whatever got a masters. May be more economical to do a 3 year English degree with a student loan, but not everyone want to be quite so far from home.

Having worked in university finance the low cash the uni receives for every Scottish student is indeed the problem. Universities all over the UK require foreign students to make the numbers add up but this is massively emphasised in Scotland due to the Scottish governments ‘free university places’ nonsense. It gets worse every year due to the English tuition fees having been frozen for years too. No new money from the uk students means we need an ever increasing amount from overseas students.

trying to rent in many Scottish cities is all but impossible, with rent in Edinburgh increasing more than any other city in the past year, due to the exercise expanding (overseas) student population. If we properly funded universities in this country we wouldn’t need as many overseas students. But we don’t do we do. And the Tories want to reduce student visas, which shows how little understanding of the situation they care to have.

and my opinion, having worked at the coal face? Ditch the ‘free tuition’ pledge as a costly, constricting middle class perk and properly fund genuinely deprived students to attended uni, opening up places which are now unavailable to local students due to the crazy cap.

It's a couple of years away for us but I'm already worried about this. Because of living in one of the least deprived postcode areas I am concerned my kids may have the grades to do the course they want to do in Scotland but may not get places due to the cap on Scottish applications. And we cannot pay for them to go here as rUK applicants can. Ironically we are paying a fortune in taxes - but potentially not to benefit our own kids. I am already hearing of people buying flats in other areas so that they can apply to university from a more deprived postcode.

And what about kids who for a whole range of reasons want to study at their local university so they can live at home? My daughter has crippling anxiety and doesn’t want to move out for university. And yet she’s not deprived in anyway so might struggle to get in to the local
university as it is one if the more favoured ones.

There isn’t a culture of going away to Uni in Scotland because most unis are in the central belt and so are most people. Obviously, that’s a generalisation but I think if you’re not Scottish you don’t realise how different the demographics are here. The population is 5.5 million and around 3.5m live in one concentrated area. Very different from England and Wales.

Thank you. I'm English (just over the border) and both DC either looked or will look at Scottish universities respectively, so it's good for us to know these things.

MaylDestroyYou
Is going away to Uni really not a thing in Scotland, then?

I think it depends on lots of things mentioned in this thread - so many Unis in the Central belt and large population here. When I came to Glasgow from Aberdeenshire 35 years ago, 80 percent of Glasgow University students stayed at home! Entry requirements at the time meant that Aberdeen University didn't offer me a place but Glasgow did, by the time my daughter went to University 30 years later the situation was reversed in terms of which universities she could get into!

I think staying at home for university is much more popular in Glasgow than other Scottish cities

Bear in mind that if you apply to England for a course with a good employment rate then the ~£30k of fees is going to be offset by a shorter (3 year) course. Whilst others are finishing off their 4 year Scottish degree you would be earning ‘back’ most of that £30 in your first year of employment and the rest via incremental rises a year earlier (due to a year of employment) than Scottish students. Which makes it pretty cost-neutral.

properly fund genuinely deprived students to attended uni,

and base this on student deprivation, not where they live. Most students who are deprived don’t live in these zones so are further disadvantaged by them.