Higher education financing in the UK’s four nations has increasingly diverged during two-and-a-half decades of devolution but it remains “highly political and consistently unstable” across all areas, regardless of the direction taken, a new report says. Instead leaders experience uncertainty and unintended outcomes, says James Miller, principal of the University of the West of Scotland. A quarter of Northern Ireland’s students also leave to study in other UK countries, facing much higher fees than their peers. While this may “bear fruit”, Baroness Wolf writes, “at present there is very little higher education in Welsh colleges, and little obvious sign of a unified sector emerging”. Overall, she says, the difficulties faced by all four systems shows a lack of “any easy solutions” and strengthens “the case for serious structural change”.

Source: The Times August 02, 2024 12:17 UTC