Please refer to THE, 11th August 2011(http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=417093&sectioncode=26)

Mike Russell:
“I believe…an additional £100 million for higher education in Scotland is what we need … to close that gap,” he said. This sum is reached “after you take off various things” such as additional income raised from charging students from the rest of the UK, which the document calculated will raise between £41 million and £74 million.
Mr Russell stressed the difficulty of calculating the scale of any gap, since it is unclear how the new English market will work in practice”

Hence Scottish universities fought like alley cats in August to get hold of as many English students , chasing them as hard as possible as they could, because each English student comes bearing a cheque for £9K per year for 3/4 years. so as to raise the millions Mr Russell refers to.

It appears Australia and Canada .are interested too. Well competition cannot be bad. Australian weather indeed!!!

Troll? indeed for disagreeing with you when you post an article which is sheer nonsense.

First ,you used London Met to attack UK immigration. :Your hatred to them goes back to several months, when you attacked the UK immigration and UKBA, for asking RGU to follow a protocol that meant that you have to go through processes to approve RGU as the highly trusted institution for non-EU visa purposes, which you did not like. At that time, you suggested Scotland should have its own immigration department, independence etc..

Second, to show how deluded you were:/are: the non-EU students that Scottish universities recruit-a large number of them after graduation or even when they drop out head towards England. I bump into Scottish and RGUs,non-EU graduates /MBAs in London and parts of England, as there are a number of them looking for work. Hence what concerns RGU, and other Scottish universities also matters to UKBA and UK immigration as it has effect on England, and other parts of UK too..

Your self-styed leadership of HE, and about your RG -related pronouncements ( you do not like them having called them as “cartels” before) , shows how much pure rhetoric is there. You say recruitment is left to universities, which means a number of aspects .. I leave it at that. But we know how these Scottish universities fought to get their hands on English students’ fee this year. If they were well funded, then why seek English students?

Sadly for you, if polls are to be believed, Scots will not vote for independence. Hence SNP to prevent egg on their faces, is interested in DevoMax as a second question, which is opposed in the rest of the UK, and by all UK parties. You have to live with UKBA and UK immigration for a considerable time!

However, what UKBA has done is to undermine the UK as a whole as a destination for higher education, and if anything some of the Russell Group universities will be hardest hit by that (and that is their own judgement also). The prospect of legitimate, compliant students being deported is nothing short of lunacy, but is a real prospect – and more importantly, is being reported as a real prospect in other countries. ‘Don’t study in the UK’ is now a slogan being put about by our competitor countries.

As for Scotland, English and non-EU international students are outside the public funding envelope and therefore universities can make their own decisions about how many to recruit. But no university has lowered its standards or entry requirements for them.

The UK economy gets a huge cash boost from international students. It is right to keep a close watch on standards. But what the public agencies are doing as regards immigration and visa rules is madness. And that’s the only message that matters here.

You are talking nonsense the same way you are talking nonsense in this article. It may be a news to you that Scottish universities bent over backwards to get the 9K per year dosh from English students, and in doing so I know in many cases they dropped their entry requirements. Why were they doing this? To help the poor English cousins? To help to get as much dosh as to pay for the hefty pay packets of VC and senior management? There were no caps for English student numbers , we were told in telephone calls. You ask your friend Mr Russell about this why he let them to do this.

About your article. Let us recall why the UKBA did what it did. According to UKBA:1 One quarter of non-EU students sampled were studying at London Met without leave to remain in the UK. 2, the university could not demonstrate students were regularly attending classes in more than half of cases.

Prejudice is one thing, and facts are another, let the former not destroy the latter.

I realise that you do not want dissent, and this will be put on hold!