A lower fee for EU students would help fund Scottish HE sustainably

It is fair to say that the Scottish government’s recently announced £55 million (5 per cent) increase in its spending on universities in 2026-27 received a somewhat underwhelmed welcome from within academia given the scale of the challenges facing institutions.

Chief among those challenges is the decline in international students since the dependants ban was introduced in 2024. The latest enrolment figures from Hesa, released last week, reveal that Scotland enrolled 14,000 fewer international students in 2024-25, compared with the peak year of 2022-23, a 17 per cent decline.

Within that, EU students have fallen by a massive 38 per cent since the peak, compared with 17 per cent for non-EU international students – although the latter account for nearly double the absolute number of students lost (just over 9,000).

It was a similar picture across the UK. But Scotland has long stood apart in the anglophone world for its principled commitment to higher education as a public good and its continuation of tuition-free education for home undergraduates. This deserves both celebration and determined protection.

Far from being an unsustainable anomaly, the Scottish model in fact aligns with the vast majority of European higher-education systems, where public service, civic culture and democratic resilience routinely take precedence over narrow conceptions of market efficiency.

An accessible higher-education system is not a luxury. It is a core condition of a well-educated body politic, one that is less vulnerable to populist misinformation and manipulation. And while universities elsewhere in the UK are free at the point of entry, the student loan system raises not only issues of distributive fairness, but also concerns about its psychological and social effects, as the current debate in England underlines.

It is undeniable that Scottish universities, like their English counterparts, depend on international fees to fill in gaps in domestic funding. But that dependence became unsustainable under the combined pressures of the pandemic and Brexit, when Scottish universities replaced the loss of EU students by recruiting non-EU overseas students at scale, while simultaneously exploiting the possibilities of online teaching.

This created a self-imposed trajectory of growth that did not, in most cases, reflect intrinsic financial need. Between the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh alone, the additional fee income generated in 2020-21 and 2021-22 was around £900,000.

From 2022-23 onwards, this model became untenable. First, the return to in-person teaching exposed physical constraints; in some cases, students were unable to secure housing and were forced to return home. Second, geopolitical instability, the growing burden of UK fees and the rising quality of domestic institutions led to sharp fluctuations in applications from East Asia, on which the largest Scottish universities had become heavily dependent. These effects were compounded by an increasingly hostile visa and migration regime. And unlike English universities, Scottish institutions could not offset these losses by expanding domestic undergraduate recruitment.

Scotland should resist calls to abandon publicly subsidised higher education, but it must also abandon unrealistic expectations of perpetual growth in international revenues largely drawn from a narrow range of volatile source markets.

A critical step in squaring that circle would be to recalibrate Scotland’s relationship with EU students. Brexit disrupted a once-healthy flow of European applicants, many of whom chose Scotland because they recognised in it a European academic ethos. They paid no tuition fees – but now, they are put off by having to pay full international fees whose level, relative to provision in many EU countries, is not justified.

The solution is to charge EU students a reduced, harmonised fee set considerably lower than the current full international rate, yet appropriately above the fee level for students from the rest of the UK: we would suggest £15,000 as an indicative upper limit. Based on our extensive European networks and regular engagement with partners across the EU, we have little doubt that this would restore European demand to pre-Brexit levels, while also restoring the cultural and geopolitical benefits of close academic exchange with neighbouring states.

It would also sit well with the UK’s recent return to Erasmus+: while Erasmus can re-establish short-term academic mobility, only a genuinely accessible fee structure will persuade visiting Erasmus students to remain in the UK for full-time degree study.

To be clear, we are not suggesting that universities should deliberately reduce non-EU international enrolment to “make space” for EU students. Nor are we proposing anything other than a rigorous and strictly meritocratic admissions regime.

That is currently under threat. The wider UK higher-education system has reached an uncomfortable equilibrium: high student fees combined with declining quality. To offset financial pressures, many institutions have abandoned small-group teaching and lowered entry standards in order to grow their class sizes.

We have had students tell us, in so many words, that a master of laws (LLM) in the UK is “a fun year abroad” because no one fails and it only takes a year – in stark contrast to the two-year, high-attrition Chinese model. But that “fun factor” is only a draw when university reputation continues to ride high – and, in the longer term, it is anathema to it. The point of reintroducing EU students is to restore a critical mass of very strong applicants.

We concede that more EU students and fewer non-EU students would result in lower revenues if the former were charged lower fees. The Dundee debacle notwithstanding, however, we think the lower income would be sustainable. Unlike in England – where international income is structurally embedded across both undergraduate and postgraduate markets – Scotland’s reliance on inflated overseas postgraduate numbers has not had time to become a deep, irreversible feature of the system.

Moreover, in the longer term, revenue would be more sustainable owing to its diversified sources and the protection it would offer for Scottish universities’ reputation for quality.

As part of that, boosting EU enrolment would restore the pipeline of European academic talent into Scottish universities. Of course, European staff can be recruited directly from continental institutions – provided that they are willing to pay the high visa fees. But, historically, much of UK academia’s European staff cohort – who contribute so much to its quality – were here from the start of their academic careers – drawn by geographic proximity, cultural affinity, and the high quality of the UK’s academic environment. They studied, trained, and ultimately settled in the UK, having been socialised into the “UK way” of academic life. Conversely, our experience on appointment panels suggests that, even before Brexit, applications from EU scholars trained wholly outside the UK were rare.

In restoring those ties, Scotland would demonstrate that there is a credible alternative to the increasingly untenable path taken elsewhere in the UK – a path that sacrifices public value for short-term financial expediency.

George Pavlakos is professor of law and philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Estelle Zinsstag is associate professor of criminology at Edinburgh Napier University and a research associate at the University of Oxford and KU Leuven.