On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week The Herald ran our latest impact series, and this time we got to have a proper look at some of the big financial issues affecting Scotland’s universities.

As is so often the case, we didn’t even get close to covering everything – and in fact, this time we made a conscious choice not to try.

When I went to Orkney last year, a full week of publishing multiple stories a day wasn’t enough to do much more than scratch the surface of that wonderful archipelago; earlier this year, when my colleague Garrett Stell and I looked at the State of Scotland’s Colleges in a wide-ranging special series of articles, we left an awful lot of material on the cutting room floor.

Trying to explore the entirety of the university sector would have meant more of the same, so we decided – thanks to some very valuable guidance from our editor, Deborah Anderson – to narrow it right down and focus largely on the key (and interconnected) issues of university finance and the makeup of the student body.

Basically we tried to find out who studies at Scottish universities, how much money the institutions need, and whether they are receiving it.

For me, the most important part of the series came right at the beginning when Garrett revealed the truth about the costs of university degrees in this country.

We had thought, naively, that this information would either be available or, at worst, fairly easy to calculate.

Instead, Garrett spent weeks trawling through data, building comparisons, going back and forth with experts, tweaking approaches, clarifying key points, gathering comments… you get the idea.

Suffice to say, he put in an enormous amount of work which, thankfully, paid off. Thanks to him, we now have a far better idea of the costs of university degrees and the extent to which those costs are covered by government funding. Long story short: there’s a pretty big gap between what universities need to meet their teaching costs and what the Scottish Government gives them.

To deal with this, university cross-subsidise with other budgets and income streams, and a big part of that, for many institutions, involves the recruitment of foreign students. Unlike students from Scotland, who study for free, or those from the rest of the UK, who pay just over £9k a year, those from overseas can be charged enormous fees to study at Scottish universities.

At Glasgow University, for example, foreign students are charged £55,000 *per year* to study medicine – despite the fact that the course is estimated to cost just over £20,000 per year to deliver. To be clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean universities see the full £35,000 difference – there are costs involved in recruiting international students, for example – but it does give a sense of the extent to which students from outside Scotland are subsidising the university education of those who have grown up here.

And just to put it out there, does it maybe raise questions about the ethics of this funding model? One where we, a former colonising power, extract wealth from other countries in order to enhance the quality of life of those living here?

On top of the core funding issue, we also wanted to get into the stats about student numbers, origins and outcomes, which meant I spent quite a bit of time working with data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, plugging it into data visualisation software, and figuring out the best way to present the data.

This process led to some very interesting insights. For example, we were able to compare every university in Scotland by the proportion of total enrolments for Scottish, rUk and non-UK students, helping us to better understand the issues that had been raised by Garrett’s analysis of funding sources.

This means that we know, for example, that some universities are massively dependent on the huge piles of cash that come with foreign students – but we also know that this is not the case for every single institution. UHI, for example, overwhelming serves Scottish students, and in fact a very large proportion of those studying there actually come from within the organisation’s “catchment” in the north and north-west of the country.

Something that became clear as we learned more and more is that universities can have very different origins, goals, and approaches, and as one international expert told me, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Another related bit of digging allowed me to map out the tuition fee regimes across Europe, which allows us to understand the Scottish and rUK approaches in a bit more context.

Obviously, there’s still a huge amount of room for further exploration of Scotland’s university sector, and something on my list is the approach we use to control access to that level of study – is it really a good idea to base something so consequential on the achievement of Highers, despite all the problems that we know are baked into the exam system? I think that’s worth a bit of work in the coming months.

But for now, we hope that our investigation has helped people to understand the reality of university funding and finances, and that it might contribute to a more informed public debate about how we approach those issues in the years to come.

And if you’ve got any ideas for other aspects of the sector we should investigate, do get in touch to let us know!