Whither Scottish Higher Education? [Special Edition: Higher Education]

The last year has seen much discussion across the UK of the funding of Higher Education. Discussion among politicians, media commentators and academics has highlighted two elements: the continuing need to find an approach to the funding of Higher Education which facilitates high, international quality of research, teaching and knowledge exchange activities; and the continuing durability of familiar and exhaustive arguments about sources of contributions to funding. Against a long-standing background of governmental financial support for the UK HE sector, policy-makers are choosing elements from a wellestablished menu of options about sources of funding, and, as evident in policies on tuition fees, those choices may vary in different parts of the UK. The recent past has also seen, in contrast to the approach taken by Dearing some fifteen years ago, a series of partial approaches to the issue of HE funding: debate on RAE/REF exercises and the associated funding regime takes place almost separately from the discussion of funding education which tends to concentrate on fees and graduate contributions.