The Tories’ planned graduate charge of £1,500 a year for university students will not be increased over the course of the next parliament, leader Ruth Davidson has pledged.
The Conservatives have come under fire from opponents after it emerged they plan to end free higher education in Scotland.
When university tuition fees were introduced in 1998 they were initially limited to £1,000 a year, but now stand at up to £9,000 for universities in England.
Ms Davidson, whose party is hoping to become the official opposition at Holyrood after the May 5 election, said it is “right and proper” that the charges her party proposes should be lower than that.
She told BBC Radio Scotland that money raised from the graduate contribution would be “ring-fenced for post-16 education”.
When asked if it would remain at £1,500, she told the Good Morning Scotland programme: “That is the policy for this parliament, absolutely.”
Ms Davidson said: “One of the big things we want to do with it is replace the money that the SNP Government has ripped out of bursaries for young people from poorer backgrounds.
“It’s shocking actually that you are only half as likely if you are from a poor background to go to university in Scotland as if you lived in another part of the UK.”
She continued: “What we want to introduce is a scheme by which once you have graduated, once you have a degree, once you are in a job and earning over a certain amount of money, over £20,000, you start to pay back a contribution to the education that you have received.
“It would be only new graduates, we wouldn’t backdate it to anybody.”
There would be “significant extra money going into universities” from the charge, she added, but she stressed it is “right and proper we’re not doing it anywhere near the levels of down south”.
Ms Davidson said: “On average we know that people with a degree will earn £100,000 more over their lifetime than those people who don’t have one. And if you continue in low-paid employment you don’t have to pay this back, that’s why it is a graduate contribution.
“But we have universities in Scotland that are crying out for more funding, we have a college sector which has been slashed and burned by the SNP in order to fund this shibboleth of free education, we have European students coming here who don’t have to pay a penny for the degree that they receive, and this would be a way for them to contribute too.”
She also defended plans to reintroduce prescription charges in Scotland, with the Tories proposing these would be £8.40.
Ms Davidson said setting the charge at that level “would replace the money that is being taken out” of the health service when the medications are dispensed for free.
Exemptions to the charges are planned so that groups such as low-paid workers, pensioners, children and students would not have to pay.
But Ms Davidson argued: “Free prescriptions has taken £60 million out of the NHS in Scotland.
“We want to put that £60 million back into frontline services of the NHS.
“I am prepared to pay a contribution if that means someone else doesn’t have to wait an hour for a bedpan in a hospital ward or can get a cancer drug that is otherwise being denied them.
“That is a decision I would take and it is one that has been a long standing position of our party for the last eight years.”