SCOTTISH university principals are expected next week to reject unanimously Downing Street’s plan for student top-up fees and express their “deep hostility” to the idea.

The move will be made at a meeting of the executive committee of Universities Scotland, which represents 13 universities and eight other higher education institutions.

While the committee — made up of six of the principals — will say that the university funding crisis should ideally be met by higher contributions from the Government and the Scottish Executive, it will also express tacit support for a graduate tax on all those in employment who have a degree.

They will say that in the absence of the necessary state provision, a graduate tax is the only way to ensure that sufficient cash is available to all universities, old and new, to sustain their status and prestige.

A pseudo-graduate tax is already up and running in Scotland in the form of an “endowment” that all new graduates from Scottish universities pay, instead of upfront tuition fees, once they are in work and earning more than £10,000. The decision to postpone payment of upfront tuition fees was agreed by the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties as a condition of their Executive coalition.

That solution was produced by a committee under the chairmanship of Sir Andrew Cubie, a solicitor, and the principals will say that they back a similar inquiry into future university funding in Scotland.

The move against top-up fees among the Scottish universities will mean that they are in direct opposition to the five or so “elite” universities in Eng land that have backed the idea. A senior universities source in Scotland said yesterday that the Scottish principals believed the promotion of top-up fees by senior UK Government insiders was based on a false premise.

“They are simply getting it wrong if they think there is a lot of money sloshing about in people’s pockets which can be tapped into,” he said. “To simply follow the American example is to forget that parents over there start trust funds for the purpose of higher education when their children are very young.

“There are simply not many people in this country who have got £6,000 or £7,000 in their pockets for their child’s fees. The people who do have that sort of cash available will want their child to go to Oxford or Cambridge and not to the newer universities. Some ministers and civil servants seem to believe there is a parental cash cow out there but it does not exist.”

He said that even if top-up fees became a reality, they would only provide large amounts of extra cash for some of the “elite” universities in England. “You can take it that there is strong hostility among all the university principals up here and absolutely no appetite for top-up fees.”

The source added that ministers should understand that the best way of getting more private sector money into universities was to initially provide more state investment. He pointed to the example of Dundee as a world-renowned biotechnology centre where state funding had been used to boost the quality of research, thus attracting private-sector companies to the area who in turn invested in the universities.

On a graduate tax, he said: “The Scottish principals do not think it is unreasonable to ask all graduates to contribute to the university education of future generations. You stop paying the present endowment in Scotland when you have paid back all your fees. Under a real graduate tax you would continue paying until you stopped earning. The amount that would have to be levied is minimal and a graduate tax would not generate the same amount of uproar as top-up fees.”

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