STEPHEN DAISLEY: The SNP has let down Scottish students... and turned others into human cash machines

By STEPHEN DAISLEY, SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL SKETCH WRITER Published: 20:34, 9 August 2026 | Updated: 20:34, 9 August 2026 This year has seen a record high in the number of Scottish pupils achieving university places. Almost 18,000 made successful applications. Education Secretary Màiri McAllan said these ‘positive results’ showed ‘the strength of Scotland’s education system’. Well, either that or it’s all down to former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who resigned last week amid accusations of plagiarism and questions over his incredible biography. Among his many feats, Arday claims he ran 30 marathons in the space of 35 days, appeared on a TV series which aired 21 years before he was born, and undertook his PhD viva one hour after suffering a stroke. I’m just saying we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that he helped all 17,920 school leavers fill out their application forms. In between parting the Red Sea and inventing the pogo stick. In all seriousness, though, the Arday scandal goes to the heart of our unhealthy relationship with higher education. Arday wasn’t waved through by the high heid yins at Cambridge purely as a box-ticking exercise, or to make the institution seem more relevant to modern Britain, or even so the administration could awards itself a moral gold star and smiley face. It was because Arday’s discipline – the sociology of education – is, like far too much of social science and humanities education in Britain, overrun by activist academics with ideology at the heart of their pedagogy, whose modest contributions to scholarship heave with obscurantist jargon even as they are light on academic value. Cambridge, like other universities, treats this communist gobbledegook with indulgence in large part because most can’t make head nor tail of it but know that asking for rigour will bring down a thundering row about sundry ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’. The Jason Arday scandal goes to the heart of our unhealthy relationship with higher education Education Secretary Màiri McAllan said that almost 18,000 successful university applications showed ‘the strength of Scotland’s education system’ The leeway given to these hobbying Marxists and their junk disciplines has done incalculable damage to the standing of higher education. But we shouldn’t rush to condemn the mote in Cambridge’s eye, or that of any other English university, without trying to dislodge the beam from our own.  Because in Scotland we compound the intellectual detritus of critical theory and political fashions with a funding model that starves higher education of the investment it needs while cynically keeping universities on a financial drip. This allows the SNP government to boast that higher education is ‘free’, compared to the fee-paying model down south, even as Scottish universities make redundancies, cut courses, and, in institutions such as Dundee, fight to stay open. One of the manifest injustices of the no-fees set-up is the limited number of places available through clearing, a sort of fallback process which affords a second chance to applicants who failed to get into any of their preferred degree programmes. As the Mail reported last week, to an outbreak of conniptions from some quarters, applicants who failed to get to university through clearing feel let down. They point to the cap, a limit on the number of Scottish students a Scottish university can accept, after which the institution can only hand out places to foreign applicants who pay for their education themselves. Some aspiring students and their parents feel priority should be given to the native population and that international places squeeze out domestic applicants. Aha, cry the advocates for the status quo!  These fools don’t know how the system works. There is no competition for places between domestic and international students. This is technically accurate but lacking on the candour front. The two types of place are separate, with the Scottish Government funding Scots, and international students stumping up for their own degrees. The latter helps universities to make up the shortfall between the cost of providing four years of tertiary education and the sum Holyrood is willing to hand over. Wait, I hear you say. Doesn’t the Scottish Government fully fund each place for Scottish students? Reader, it does not. Universities must find cash elsewhere, which is where international students come in, and where the rammy over places for Scots begins.  For though it is true that a chemistry applicant from Chengdu does not deny a place that could have gone to a school leaver from Chapelhall, it is only true because the current system places international students in a separate category. Breaking news: other systems exist. It is a political choice to fund higher education the way this government does, a choice to impose a cap so that too many Scots don’t get accepted and push up the overall cost of the SNP’s ‘free tuition’ policy. The result of those choices is that the kid from Chapelhall is squeezed out, not by the blameless Chinese student who just wants to come to Scotland to study, but by a policy stopgap designed to save face, and bottom line, for a government that refuses to admit its tuition policy does not work. What’s my alternative? Shift the financial burden from the taxpayer to the party that benefits most immediately from higher education: the student. Introduce a combination of upfront fees and a solidarity payment to be made once a graduate is earning above a set level. Allow universities to charge market rate but require them to match Scottish Government funding for capable applicants from poor backgrounds. One of the likely consequences of my approach would be a drop in the numbers attending university. That is not my intention, only a happy accident. Around one-third of Scottish adults now holds a degree, an increase of 25 per cent since 2011. I have one in arts and another in social sciences, the first paid for under the pre-SNP system and the latter self-funded. University was a wonderful experience and in many ways the ideal life for me: hidden away in Glasgow University library, poring over musty, yellowing tomes, churning out essays, and generally avoiding all human contact. Around one-third of Scottish adults now holds a degree, an increase of 25 per cent since 2011 But I did not need a degree to do the job I do today. I suspect there are others like me out there who entered higher education because by the turn of the century it was the done thing. When I was in secondary school, university attendance was pushed as relentlessly as apprenticeships had been to the previous generation. This was especially true if, like me, you were a bright pupil from a modest background.  Higher education was finally being opened up to the likes of you and you had jolly well better be enthusiastic about it. It was chippy, working-class vanity on my part. In placing university on a pedestal, schools have served very poorly those pupils who either don’t need to go to university or would struggle to handle the demands of the work. The jobs of the future will be those where technical ability and practical skills matter rather than scholarly enquiry or comparative analysis. Training in these disciplines belongs properly in the college sector, as does most vocational education. A pivot to further education will mean some universities go to the wall. That is regrettable for those working in the sector but unavoidable whatever funding mechanism is in place. Universities are still essential for the teaching of the arts, humanities, social sciences, the professions and highly theoretical or specialised disciplines, but reversing their over-expansion will go some way to addressing the marking workload placed on academics, the pressure to publish in volume rather than quality, and the unspoken expectation that lecturers will overlook shortcomings in English proficiency and other measures of scholarly ability among the human cash machines of Scottish higher education, international students A university education should be an end in itself, not a vote-buying scheme from desperate politicians. Free the sector from the tyranny of the cap and higher education will find its own way forward.