Universities and colleges in Scotland face big financial problems. At the same time, despite not having to pay fees, Scottish students incur large debts to cover living costs. So an apparently neat solution seems to be gaining political support: reduce the length of undergraduate degree programmes from four to three years, the standard in the rest of the UK. Graduates would spend less on rent and living costs. Universities would spend less on teaching them.
The argument is backed up by two further observations. One is an ostensibly plausible claim of educational feasibility. Most school students who intend to enter university now remain in school for six years. School leavers from fifth year make up only 10% of all school-leaver entrants to higher education. The proportion is probably even lower for entry to university (rather than college): of school leavers from Scotland aged 18 or under who were accepted for entry to university through the UCAS system in 2025, only 6% were aged under 17. Therefore, this argument goes, these students who have studied Advanced Highers in sixth year find themselves having to duplicate that school work during the first year of an undergraduate degree.
Another quite different argument might also seem to support a reduction in degree length: inequities across the UK. A university student in Scotland who follows what is now the typical path will have received a total of 17 years of expensive public subsidy for their full-time education (7 in primary, 6 in secondary, 4 in university). In England, the typical university student is supported only for 16 years (6 in primary, 7 in secondary, 3 in university). This differential in the duration of tax-funded support further exacerbates the supposed UK-wide inequity of Scottish students’ not having to pay fees.
These arguments are controversial even in their implications for higher education itself. The political controversies around fees are well-known. The explosive potential of universities’ saving money by, in effect, doing a quarter less teaching would make the current level of disruption by strikes over redundancy and pay look benign: crudely, the savings would be achieved only with the loss of a quarter of teaching staff.
But rarely even mentioned in this debate are the potentially harmful implications of shorter degrees for schools and for school leavers.
The first problem is the premise that six years of secondary school have become the norm. In fact, they haven’t. About four in ten students leave school before sixth year. The entrants to higher education from fifth year may be a minority, but the opportunity which this offers to students is not negligible: this route includes 13% of leavers from S5. Because hardly any fifth-year students take Advanced Highers (about 0.6%), almost none of these entrants experience any duplication in the first year of higher education.
In fact, the route from school to higher education from Highers remains more common than the route via Advanced Highers. In 2024, for example, the number of school leavers who entered higher education with only Highers was 12,600. The number of school leavers who entered with any Advanced Highers was 9,600. The published statistics don’t tell us how many of these Highers-only entrants came from sixth year, but, even with expansion, taking Advanced Highers is not the main purpose of that school year. Only about 40% of students who stay on to sixth year take any Advanced Highers, and at most 30% take only these. Fully 71% of sixth-year students take Highers – either trying to raise their grades from Highers they have already taken in fifth year, or extending the breadth of their curriculum by taking new Highers. Two thirds of sixth-year candidates take more than one Higher, and one third take more than two. Highers are thus a core part of the sixth year. Treating sixth year as a kind of surrogate first year of higher education – as the proposal for three-year degrees threatens to do – would seriously distort what the sixth year has become. The cost of educating most university entrants for an extra year (compared to England) is perhaps the price that is paid for the extra opportunities that sixth year offers the six out of ten students who take no Advanced Highers.
One reason for these patterns is that about one third of school-leaver entrants to higher education do not enter university at all. They enter courses leading to a Higher National Certificate or Diploma (HNC or HND). These are students who enter by age 18. Among those who enter within the following two years, the proportion is 38%, and for all ages older than that it is one half or more. The importance of the non-degree programmes in Scottish higher education is far greater than in England (where the proportion of all higher-education entrants is about one on nine). The Scottish courses at this level are often ignored in policy debate because, unlike in England, they are provided mainly by further education colleges and are thus not included in the statistical publications from the university entrance system, UCAS. These programmes in Scotland are much better at widening access than degree programmes in university. If school sixth year was forced to become a preparatory year for three-year degrees, then it would be at risk of squeezing out those students who use that school year to upgrade their Highers for entry to HNCs and HNDs.
Even for degree programmes, moreover, the claim that Advanced Highers duplicate first year is too simple. At most, it is true of STEM subjects – mathematics, science, and engineering. It is rare for Scottish universities to offer entry to second year in arts or social science programmes, because there are no subjects at Higher or Advanced Higher that cover the range of topics that would typically appear in a first-year university programme. There are no up-to-date published statistics on the extent to which students with Advanced Highers do enter directly into second year of degree programmes at Scottish universities, but the most recent evidence – from 2017 – showed the proportion to be very small (only 1.4% of leavers from sixth year, or fewer than 1% of all leavers). A similarly small number of students with Advanced Highers go to universities elsewhere in the UK, essentially using these qualifications analogously to A-levels – around 6% of all university entrants from Scotland, or about 1.6% of all school leavers.
Several Scottish universities do offer second-year entry in STEM programmes, but some have gradually adjusted upwards the content of their first-year courses to such an extent that they recommend that students should have taken Advanced Higher. (The entrance requirements may be found through the UCAS course selector.) In a few universities, this has been to meet the levels of prior attainment of significant numbers of students from outside Scotland, with qualifications such as A-levels or the International Baccalaureate. For example, nine Scottish universities offer single-honours degrees in mathematics. Two of them recommend Advanced Higher mathematics for entry to first year. Moreover, a mere Advanced Higher is often not enough to by-pass first year. All nine offer direct entry to secondary year, but six require for this an A at Advanced Higher mathematics. Of all leavers from school sixth year, only 5% attained an A at Advanced Higher mathematics; these are fewer than 3% of all leavers.
For university degrees which require combinations of advanced expertise, the requirements of school attainment are even stricter. Eight universities have single-honours programmes in physics, two of which recommend Advanced Higher mathematics for entry to first year. In five of the eight, entry to second year requires an Advanced Higher A in mathematics or physics (and two require both at A). Since only 1.6% of leavers from sixth year have an A in Advanced Higher physics, the proportion who could enter directly to second year is tiny.
The same can be said of all other programmes which require an A in specific Advanced Highers. Across all Advanced Highers, only 15% of leavers from sixth year gain at least one A, and a mere 5% gain at least two As. They are 9% and 3% of all leavers. These proportions are likely to be the upper limits on how many students could ever benefit from shortening the length of degree programmes unless the standards of these programmes were to be significantly weakened.
Whatever the merits of changing the structure of university degrees in Scotland, the wider educational implications of doing so could be severe. It could distort the purpose of school sixth year, disrupt the transition to non-degree higher education, complicate entry to nearly all non-science degree programmes, and – even in science – benefit fewer than one in six school-leaver entrants to university. In short, school students would suffer. Would it really be sensible to expect them to pay that educational price for the financial crisis engulfing universities and colleges?
Lindsay Paterson is Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at the University of Edinburgh