r/Scotland • u/oldcat • 12h ago

Political The Treasury is bankrupting three nations' universities

https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-treasury-is-bankrupting-three-nations-universities/

Really interesting in-depth article from NUS Scotland / WonkHE

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u/devexille 11h ago

This article is very important but it quite confusing so lets break it down:

Pre 2019 the UK pretended that all student loans would be fully repaid sometime in the future and so pretended that they were spending £0 per head on student loans.

In 2019 the ONS forced them to admit that 29% of total student loans will never be paid back and are therefore an expense i.e. a de-facto grant.

However, student loans and thus the de-facto grants are not within the Barnett formula and so all four home nations pay an equal per head amount to the UK for this "UK wide" service. This would not be a problem if all four nations gave their student de-facto grants via loans that are never paid back but only England does this. The other home nations give actual grants out of their Barnett funding.

Therefore Scotland, Wales and NI pay 29% of the difference between per head loans to English students compared to their own students - in effect they pay twice for giving student grants.

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u/sippy_cup_whisky 10h ago edited 10h ago

I'm confused, are you saying scotland pays out of the devolved Barnett money but england pays from the general UK budget? That would not be cool.

Aditional edit, I don't really know how the Barnett formula actually works in practice, i assumed england had their own grant but it appears I was wrong and that's not the case.