— Carlo Morelli, Dundee UCU
Scotland’s free tuition: an impediment to re-colonialisation?
Four UCU branches in Scotland have successfully balloted for industrial action; Strathclyde, Heriot Watt, Aberdeen and Stirling. This is alongside Dundee which has a current mandate and has taken 26 days of strike action since January 2025 and Edinburgh UCU which has initiated a new ballot. All are in dispute over threatened redundancies and course closures as financial crises hit the wider sector.
The current financial crisis affecting Scottish Higher Education institutions and comparatively poor performance in international rankings is widely portrayed to be as a result of the differential impact of home tuition fees relative to the rest of the UK university sector. In Scotland free tuition for home students, established in 2008, remains today compared to the £9k fee since 2008 and now linked to inflation.
In the run up to the Scottish Parliamentary elections in May 2026 co-ordinated pressure to abandon free tuition for home students has been the focus of work from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Carnegie Trust for Universities in Scotland and University’s Scotland, the employer body for Scottish Universities.[i] Most recently the principal of Aberdeen University identified resolving the funding gap with the question of introducing student tuition fees[ii]
Universities Scotland have estimated 11 of the 18 institutions face deficits and major funding changes are required.[iii] Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, has gone further suggesting that devolved governments and administrations variation from the English HE sector approach to fees has also impacted negatively on international student recruitment:
“[D]evolution has made it harder to convey the concept of a single UK higher education sector on the world stage” and concludes “In short, it should not be unreasonable to ask whether, in some areas at least, devolution may just have gone too far.”[iv]
The difference is certainly real. UK Higher Education has seen a major growth in income since the introduction of tuition fees. A market for higher education both facilitated a wide-spread recruitment boom in home students, particularly following the rise in fees to £9,000 in 2008, and a targeting of international students. HESA figures show total income between 2015-16 and 2023-24 rose from £35bn to £54bn, faster than the rise in inflation of 34% over the same period.[v] The figures for non-EU tuition fee income rose still faster from £5bn in 2017-18 to £11bn in 2023-24.[vi] In Scotland, income for over the same period only rose from £3.6bn to £4.9bn while non-EU tuition fee income rose from £0.6bn to £1.2bn.
However, this limitation of access to financial resources has only restricted, rather than stopped, the extent to which Scottish higher education could participate in the financial boom created by high home and international student tuition fees.
While Scottish participation in the marketisation of higher education is understood as falling behind that of the rest of the UK, a solution focused upon increasing marketisation ignores the financial crisis created in the English, Welsh and northern Irish areas of the UK. Scotland is not immune from the financial crisis created by marketisation but the more marketised parts of the sector have seen the same, if not worse, problems. The Office for Students estimates that 45% of institutions face deficits in 2025-26.[vii]
This increase of income throughout the UK has resulted in an increasing exploitation of staff combined with a maximising of fees for home students. At the same time rather than an adoption of ‘de-colonisation’ of UK higher education the market for higher education has led to a re-colonisation focusing upon the financial stripping of wealth, in contrast to the human and physical resources of previous eras, as a modern form of colonialism. Class exploitation at home combined with colonialism abroad has become the motif of UK Higher Education.
Co-ordinated industrial action
An alternative model for higher education is to re-state the role of universities providing a public good, financed out of general taxation and free to all. The ending of marketisation, rather than its intensification is the means to a solution to the crisis in the sector. The agency to achieve this can come from the staff, students (home and international) and wider community campaigning for free education. Dundee’s 26 days of strike action forced the Scottish Government to commit a further £62m to the University. This is not to mention the ever-ready funding available for warfare by the UK Government.
There is a potential to stop the movement towards exploiting staff and students, home and international, in the race to re-colonise higher education. This comes from co-ordinated industrial action among those universities with existing live mandates and drawing in those who are following. Collectively, we can act to provide a unifying focus challenging the pro-market agenda and place the defence of free publicly funded education at the heart of the election period Scotland is moving into. This is an opportunity that should not be missed and can be an example to the wider UK sector of how to win gains and push back against the marketisation that is ruining the sector.
Scottish HE, mediocrity and 1707
Finally, it is worthwhile reflecting on Nick Hillman’s consideration that devolution has gone too far.
Karl Marx is credited with the phrase “history repeats itself first as tragedy second as farce” to explain how “circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part” in historical processes.[viii] This seems an apt description of what is now unfolding in Scottish Higher Education.
The question Hillman is raising for Scotland’s Higher Education is what path should it now take? Return to 1707 and its absorption into the UK model of a marketised HE sector or defend the role of Scotland’s higher education as a public good and their retention of universities as public bodies?
For readers without a knowledge of Scottish history, 1707 and the Acts of Union were the acts which merged the Scottish parliament into the English parliament. It is a union which is popularly identified with the abolition of a Scottish state, to which an independent Scotland would dissolve.
More accurately, for the purposes of this article, and following the work of Neil Davidson, it can be identified with the abandonment of a distinctive path of capitalist development and its absorption into the creation of Great Britain’s capitalist state formation and, specifically, colonial expansion.[ix] Attempts to create a distinctive Scottish colonial project for economic expansion failed disastrously with the collapse of the Darien venture in the 1690s, leading by the early eighteenth century a desire of the Scottish agricultural, trading and manufacturing interests to hitch their economic fortunes to that of the more successfully developing English state and empire.
After 1707, the Scottish ruling class developed as an integral part of the British state’s development taking leading roles in its military, economic and political institutions. Whether this was through the creation of distinctive military regiments whose oppression of indigenous peoples are celebrated in regimental histories, providing profitable opportunities for owners and managers of slave plantations, trading networks or extractive industries and manufacturing firms or finally providing the civil servants and political leaders throughout Great Britain and its Empire. Class exploitation at home combined with Empire and colonialism abroad was the model adopted by the leading capitalist economy of the time.
The solutions being promoted by Hillman and the mediocrity that currently run our Higher Education sector is a return to 1707.
Notes
[i] See Funding of tertiary education in Scotland report – Royal Society of Edinburgh : Royal Society of Edinburgh, Tuition Fees are a social contract with small print – The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland Our universities in support of Scotland in support of Scotland
[ii] Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco, 2016), ‘A moment of reckoning for the University of Aberdeen’, Herald 28th February 2026.
[iii] Universities Scotland (2026), Our Universities in Support of Scotland — Universities Scotland accessed 22nd February 2026.
[iv] Nick Hillman, (2026), “Has devolution gone too far? RSE Conference December 2024. Funding_tertiary_paper_Hillman.pdfaccessed 22nd February 2026.
[v] HESA, available at Table 1 – Consolidated statement of comprehensive income and expenditure 2015/16 to 2024/25 | HESA. Inflation index available from Inflation calculator | Bank of England accessed 22nd February 2026
[vi] HESA available at Table 6 – Tuition fees and education contracts analysed by HE provider, domicile, mode, level, source and academic year 2016/17 to 2024/25 | HESA accessed 22nd February 2026.
[vii] Office for Students, (2025), Significant challenges continue to face higher education finances – with nearly half facing deficits in 2025-26 – Office for Students accessed 22nd February 2026.
[viii] Karl Marx, (1984), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Lawrence & Wishart: London. p.10.
[ix] Neil Davidson, (2000), The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, Pluto Press: London. pp.90-111.