UNIVERSITIES are treating college students like second class citizens when they pursue a degree, according to Scotland’s new fair access tsar.
Professor Peter Scott, the Commissioner for Fair Access, said it should be easier for those studying higher education qualifications in college to move to a degree.
Under the current system college students studying Higher National qualifications should “articulate” into the second or third year of a university degree, but more than half do not.
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Mr Scott said: “There are two areas of concern. One is that individual students are prolonging their education so issues of debt and worry about entering the labour market are worse for them.
“Secondly, it is a waste that you are duplicating a funded place which could have been available to another student and more could be done to improve that.”
Mr Scott said universities sometimes started from the position that a Higher National student was “guilty until proved innocent”.
He added: “I think we should try and shift that round and say, on the whole, it is innocent until proved guilty and that the starting point should be you are given advanced standing.”
The intervention came after figures showed Scotland’s older universities account for only six per cent of students from the most deprived backgrounds moving from college to university.
Of a total of 113 students, 91 are made to start in first year and ten are allowed into second year. Only half enter at the year and level they should.
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In a written submission to the Scottish Parliament’s education committee NUS Scotland said: “It is incredibly disappointing that there continues to be huge disparities in work on articulation between our different types of university.
“Articulation is a success story, but far from the complete success it should be because countless students, often from our most deprived backgrounds, are made to repeat years of study, taking on extra debt, workload and costs.”
In an evidence session on better university access MSPs heard a suggestion that all children should be given a “unique learner number” to track progress.
Petra Wend, principal of Queen Margaret University, in Edinburgh, said two out of three children who were deprived were not currently being picked up because of flaws in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) - the common measure of deprivation.
She said SIMD was not the “right way” to measure deprivation and that a unique learner number would be better at tracking progress.
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Asked about whether middle class students could miss out in future Dame Ruth Silver, who chaired the government-backed Commission on Widening Access, said the system was currently unfair.
She said: “You have displacement now of bright people who don’t have the right badges, through no fault of their own.”
She added: “Scotland, in the four nations, has got the highest percentage of advantaged young people going into university than the other nations.”
The Scottish Government has set a target for one fifth of students entering university by 2030 to be from Scotland’s 20 per cent most deprived communities, measured by SIMD.
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