TUITION fees at Scottish universities may have to rise in order to keep the institutions functioning at "world class" levels.
The detail emerged at the Scottish Affairs Committee this afternoon in Westminster, where experts told MPs of the impact the pandemic had had on the sector.
Professor James Conroy, Dean for Global Engagement (Europe) and Vice Principal Emeritus at the University of Glasgow. told MPs that he was concerned Scottish universities relied too much on the charity sector for research funding, in areas such as biomedical sciences, and said the current tuition fee levels were "unsustainable".
He said: "It's unsustainable to have fee levels where they are at the moment. To put it in perspective. I was, in a previous incarnation, at the Faculty of Education where we got at the time 8,400 monthly per capita - it's 2000, less today. And that's something like 12 years later.
"The present levels of funding are unsustainable to maintain our world class university system and Scotland has a world class system.
"We are increasingly dependent on an International student fee income to not just plug the gap but to create the facilities, the capital spend that maintains our infrastructure."
Professor Conroy was joined by Dr Vicky Johnson, Director of the Centre for Remote and Rural Communities (CRRC) at the University of the Highlands and Islands, and Alistair Sim, director at representative body Universities Scotland.
Mr Sim warned MPs that universities are thought to have lost almost £200m this academic year due to the collapse of international student registrations.
He told the committee that initially there had been predictions that Scottish institutions could face a loss of more than £650m, however estimates have now been revised as some students have started courses online from their home countries.
Mr Sim explained: "A briefing on financial impacts projected that if there was a complete collapse of the international student market for Scotland, institutions will be facing a loss in the current academic year of £651million, and that's from an overall turnover for the higher education sector in Scotland of about 4 billion pounds...
"Now as things have moved on, some students have come, enrolments have looked better than expected.
"The last estimate the Scottish Funding Council made was of a potential £191m loss across the sector in the current academic year, which is still pretty serious.
"I think some institutions are still optimistic that the international numbers will will keep improving, and people will actually travel from China, will arrive here, will pay their fees."
Mr Sim said that while the international student decline has led to a loss in revenue, another source of funding has also been eradicated by the pandemic.
H explained: "There's other losses, of course, that you've got to take into account such as conferences. A lot of conferencing business, for instance, is just going out the window for the future with firms, and for a number of universities it is a really important way of using facilities."
Dr Johnson also said young people living in remote areas, such as the Highlands and Islands, should be encouraged to stay nearby and stop the "brain drain" of talent going elsewhere in the UK.
She said this could help to balance the levels of funding between Scottish and English universities.
She said: "I mean, first of all I would want to stop the young people going out of the Highlands and Islands, and Moray and Perthshire. So I would want to stop the brain drain, and I really would want to see support for early career research development, and to building up focal research areas in universities."
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