But, in the grown-up world, it's no big deal. According to the Executive press release, income of some £15 million per year will be lost. Absolute peanuts in terms of the Executive's budget (of about £30 billion), although it may not seem that way to a student.
So why the hoopla? Did this justify a ministerial statement to parliament? Why did the SNP government make this their first major educational announcement? Could it be that everything else in the educational world is just too difficult?
4 comments:
I have to applaud the previous lot on their apparent iron-willed reluctance to carry out populist measures - 15 million quid. Bugger all!
Some other blogger tried to spin the graduate endowment as 'limiting access to uni on ability to pay'. That kind of nonsense bugs me.
I think it's well worthy of a ministerial statement, for no other reason than to make some political hay out of the easiest of sweeteners.
This is a big move for Scotland though, whether students pay for uni or not is a big decision. I t may cost £15m (sounds cheap to me by the way). But this isn't just a one year thing, it lasts a long time and if a downside of this decision is that we get a bunch of lazy Scottish students who don't put a shift on cos the course is free anyway, then it might backfire.
But for now, I'll clap my hands and optimistically cross my fingers that writing off the existing student debt is due to follow!
Oh no no no. No retrospective writing off. No chance.
"if a downside of this decision is that we get a bunch of lazy Scottish students who don't put a shift on cos the course is free anyway, then it might backfire."
Oh they are already there I can assure you. Unfortunately when you have the ludicrous levels of student numbers that we have, where the number of students is way in excess of the numbers who have the intellectual capacity to actually cope with a genuinely Higher Education, then it is inevitable that you will get a lot of wasters. Hence the noddy degree factories we have created. Still, there are more objectionable ways of spending taxpayers money I suppose.
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