Another week goes by and another blemish in the Government's deeply-flawed policy of charging students' means-tested tuition fees and abolishing maintenance grants is exposed. This time we learn that the blatant anomaly will put veterinary medicine students at a severe financial disadvantage
compared with medical and dentistry undergraduates whose courses also take five years. Ministers have decided that, because veterinary students are being trained for private practice, they will not receive the extra funding which caps the annual #1000 fee charges at a maximum of three years for their medical and dentistry counterparts.
The ceiling applies, in fact, to all full-time undergraduates in Scotland, as long as they are Scottish or from other EU countries apart from England or Wales: the greatest anomaly of them all. To insist on eligible vet students paying the full #5000 would be deeply unfair, as well as highly irregular. What about those doctors who practice privately, either full or part-time? The extra fees will not apply. It seems virtually impossible these days for adults to enrol with a dentist unless it is as a private patient.
Yet no student dentist will face extra fees before going into what is effectively private practice. Neither will four-year honours students. Yet most of them go into the private sector, for instance business and the law, as do graduates from five-year architecture courses. They, too, will be protected. The Government appears intent on covering its ears to cries of injustice. If it will not do the decent thing and address the injustice itself it should remember that many vets do potentially life-saving work keeping on top of BSE, for instance, as part-time inspectors for the state. Presumably it wants this arrangement to continue but it will surely be put at risk if potential vets are put off the course by an indefensible additional burden of debt.
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