CALLS for Scots students to repay part of their tuition fees once they graduate in response to the coronavirus have been condemned as “ideologically motivated”.

Robin McAlpine, director of the Common Weal think tank and former chief lobbyist for the university sector, says universities are to blame for their own financial troubles and students should not be made to suffer as a result.

He said universities were warned against the risks of becoming too reliant on bringing in fees from foreign students but “built an entire financial model based on this risky market”.

McAlpine accused universities of using this money to “build property empires and inflate salaries”.

The University and College Union (UCU) and Scottish Greens also hit out at the fees call.

The Reform Scotland think tank last week urged the return of the graduate endowment, meaning Scottish students would have to pay back part of their fees once they were earning the average Scottish salary.

Reform Scotland’s director, Chris Deerin, said: “More than half of our universities were already in deficit before coronavirus, and increasingly reliant on fee-paying students from the rest of the UK and the rest of the world to stay afloat.”

However, McAlpine said: “It’s a surprise to see the issue of making university students pay for their education is yet again rearing its head in Scotland. It seems like no crisis isn’t an opportunity for those who want to commercialise our universities. The flaw in this ideologically motivated policy is easy enough to see.

“The reason universities are in trouble is because they massively expanded their commercial sale of education to overseas students and then built an entire financial model based on this risky market.

“People warned that this was asking for trouble in the future but the warnings were not heeded. The money was used to build property empires and inflate salaries.”

In 2017, it was reported that the average Scottish university principal had enjoyed a pay increase of 43% since 2007, while staff pay saw a real-term fall of 16% over a similar period.

McAlpine added: “When most people across the UK are coming to recognise that inter-generational inequality is condemning a generation of young people to insecure lives, a call to transfer the burden of failure from older, wealthier taxpayers to younger, poorer students is certainly radical, if not coherent.”

Universities across Scotland have been hit by two strikes this academic year led by the UCU, which was calling for fairer pay and an end to the casualisation of work contracts, among

other things.

Scotland officer Mary Senior said: “Re-introducing tuition fees for Scottish-domiciled and EU students is not the answer to the university funding crisis, and the middle of a coronavirus pandemic is hardly the time to increase the levels of debt students incur to gain a university education.

“The bill needs to be shared by all those benefitting from university graduates, particularly large employers via fair corporation taxes.”

Scottish Greens education spokesperson Ross Greer said: “Graduates already pay for the costs of their tuition, through income tax. There are plenty of fair and sensible ways we could raise more funds for universities and colleges, all without burdening the next generation with even more student debt than the last, for instance by forcing multinational companies like Virgin and Amazon to start paying their fair share in tax.”

Alex Salmond’s SNP Government scrapped the endowment in 2008.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “We remain committed to free higher education for Scots-domiciled students and access to university being based on the ability to learn, not the ability to pay.

“We fully realise the detriment that losing international students from our education system will have in 2020/21 and beyond. We are working in partnership with universities and colleges to address the challenges and announced on May 6 an additional £75 million for research.”