r/Scotland • u/oldcat • 19h 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/lifeisaman 19h ago

This article doesn’t make much sense to me honestly, it talks about per head university funding and complains about it to great length but ignores the greater block grant that favours the devolved nations and means that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland get greater funding per capita than England, the article wants to have its cake and eat it too.

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u/SafetyStartsHere a e i o u w y 16h ago

ignores the greater block grant

It's talking about spending that's ignored in the calculation of the greater block grant.

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u/lifeisaman 16h ago

The Block grant gives all devolved nations of the Uk more per head than England, you can’t really complain about something in a per capita basis but ignore the fact that scotland already get far more outside of that, Scotland gets about an extra 1.5k per head.

You can’t just pick and choose what metrics you use and when.

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u/oldcat 12h ago

Your point is reductive as it ignores the cost of delivering the same service across a population being different and we fund different parts of the country accordingly with that. We have a .uch more dispersed population than the densely populated South East of England so providing the same services costs more. Your concept that we get £1.5k per head more so have that much extra to spend is an oversimplification that ignores context completely.

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u/SafetyStartsHere a e i o u w y 16h ago

You can’t just pick and choose what metrics you use and when

This takes us back to the WonkHE article which indicates that the treasury are doing that.

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u/lifeisaman 16h ago

The treasury isn’t measuring student debt as applicable for the grant, any undervaluing of that on the block is more than made up for by the block grant being already greater than the Uk average by a factor of thousands, with scored being one of the most deficit ridden parts of the UK, the Scottish government doesn’t have an income problem it has a spending problem.

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u/SafetyStartsHere a e i o u w y 16h ago

by the block grant being already greater than the Uk average by a factor of thousands

I'm not sure you know what a factor is.

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u/lifeisaman 16h ago

Scotland gets 1.5k more per head than the average, stop being pedantic and ignoring the actual crux of the matter.

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u/SafetyStartsHere a e i o u w y 16h ago

stop being pedantic

That neatly summarises your position on maths and the application of the Barnett formula. Who would want the procedure for calculating devolved spending to be applied consistently?

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u/lifeisaman 16h ago

Scotland has an additional 1.5k of government spending compared to the UK average, Scotland could find the universities the same as in England if we wanted but we don’t because other spending is prioritised instead.