r/Glasgow Tools

No you aren't getting this quite right.

How the SIMD project works is 20% of the undergraduate home student body must come from the bottom 20% of households according to the SIMD index. There is further target of 40% coming from the bottom 40% but you never see that talked about anymore as it was met almost instantly.

If you walk through a classroom at UWS the student you meet there will be just as likely to be from a working class background as someone you met on the street in Scotland. That was the aim of the SIMD system and there are a lot of universities who have been successful in it.

Universities in Scotland are basically divided in two. There is the Scottish university side which is made up of all the students getting an entirely free education from the Scottish government and the international side where they can charge fees.

The Scottish government goes to each university each year and says: Alright you get 5000 spots of fully sponsored students that the Scottish government pays for. The rules are they must be Scottish and, recently, that 20% of them come from the bottom 20% of income households and 40% must come from the bottom 40% of households. They don't care how many foriegn or English students the university takes and don't limit that as they aren't paying for that. What they demand is that the university makes its Scottish student numbers and that they represent the Scottish population in terms of income.

Places like Edinburgh Uni are very very high ranked and have a global reputation so they will get whole lots of people coming from England, China, America, etc, wanting to come. Someplace like UWS (although a perfectly fine uni) does not have that kind of reach so will be almost entirely Scottish students.

Scottish students in Scottish universities do tend to represent the income demographics of the country. Not entirely but getting very close.