Newton Emerson: The North’s attitude to university fees is causing a brain drain

In the heady days of January, after Stormont was restored and before coronavirus struck, Northern Ireland had a brief debate about raising university tuition fees.

DUP First Minister Arlene Foster said it should be considered, Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill ruled it out, the DUP quickly decided the debate was over and the other three executive parties kept quiet.

Now the implications have been brought home.

This year’s undergraduate entry requirements show Northern Ireland’s universities operating a two-tier system: students from the North need significantly higher grades than applicants from Britain.

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For example, Northern Ireland students need three As at A-level to do law at Queen’s University Belfast, while applicants from Britain need only three Bs.

The story of how a policy designed to help young people get into university has had the opposite effect is complex, forehead-slappingly stupid and highly revealing of how Stormont works – or does not work.

It begins in 1998 with a Labour government phasing in tuition fees across the UK, via student loans repaid through a graduate tax.

Fee income was fronted up to universities while their direct government grants were cut, with the intention of allowing them to compete for more students and expand at will.

In 2011, by which point fees had tripled to £3,000 (€3,317) a year, a Conservative government suddenly completed the programme by tripling fees again, to what has remained roughly their final level in England ever since.

Stormont initially intended to follow suit but balked after public and student objections. Instead, it froze fees in Northern Ireland and made up the difference through direct grants to universities – something it had to pay for itself, under the arcane rules of devolutionary accounting.

The decision was taken by an Alliance minister, with full Sinn Féin and DUP support.

Cap on numbers

To keep grants under control, Stormont capped the number of local students Northern Ireland’s universities can admit. However, students from Britain can be recruited without limit, as they pay full fees.

This has caused or entrenched a series of disastrous trends. One-quarter of students have to leave Northern Ireland because they cannot find courses at home. Most go reluctantly, as they have to pay full fees in Britain, and two-thirds never return.

Only a trickle of students from Britain study in the North, turning the local student cap into a de facto budget cap and preventing universities from expanding. The resulting brain drain is increasingly recognised as a critical brake on productivity and growth. Only 40 per cent of young adults in the North are educated to degree level, compared with 60 per cent in the Republic.

Tragically, these are debates the DUP and Sinn Féin can have all day

The long-standing consensus that Northern Ireland’s two main universities have regional responsibilities has been shattered. Queen’s once prided itself on having one of the most socially diverse intakes in the UK. Now it is pitching for the cream of the local crop.

Ulster University was set up in the 1960s to complement Queen's. Today, it competes with it for students, running the same courses and even building a new central Belfast campus. Yet both universities are turning northern students away.

Provincial cringe factor

Academia wants to look outward and rightly so but the culture of competition at Queen’s and Ulster also has a strong provincial cringe factor. Both have been far too quick to lapse into a view that local is second best.

A final irony is how little difference all this makes, apart from locking out northern applicants.

Baseline university income is unaffected: if fees went up, grants would go down.

Stormont’s direct grants to universities are running at about £180 million a year. This is the sum Foster thought might be saved. However, raising fees would increase loan defaults, which come out of Stormont’s budget.

Stormont is spending another £100 million on individual grants to low-income students, to pay the fees they still face.

Loan repayments are means-tested by income. Because Northern Ireland has the lowest wages in the UK, it is by far the cheapest place to borrow fees. In effect, only successful professionals will ever repay them. A shortage of graduates is, of course, what is ultimately holding wages down.

It is no revelation that Stormont struggles to ask any section of society to put its hand in its pocket, despite almost every party being virtually guaranteed office. A debate in January on introducing water charges was also quickly slapped down. But on water charging, Stormont is merely failing to invest in the economy. By subsidising tuition fees, it is actively spending a similar sum damaging the economy, in full knowledge of doing so, merely to placate a mainly middle-class group of parents and students who believe – wrongly – that they benefit from it.

Appeals to tribalism may be the only way forward. The brain drain is perceived as disproportionately harming the unionist population, while also vastly raising the cost of a united Ireland.

Tragically, these are debates the DUP and Sinn Féin can have all day.