The key message, or ‘story’, that many newspapers took from the recent report by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland was that because less than half - 44 per cent - of the public believed that the Scottish Government should continue to provide tuition-free higher education and slightly more - 48 per cent - believed students should be charged fees the policy of ‘free’ higher education had become unsustainable.

This chimes with the emerging consensus among the policy class, but not Scotland’s political parties (bar the Conservatives), that free tuition is an anachronism and charging fees is the way of the future; that free tuition is regressive because it subsidises the middle classes, although funding higher education out of general taxation was apparently acceptable when entry to universities was even more restricted and middle-class than it is today; and that free education has become an SNP fetish.

In fact free, or very low-fee, tuition is the norm across Europe. It is England where the UK Government charges the highest fees of any public system of higher education in the world that is the outlier. If free........

© Herald Scotland