IF the UK Government settles for a hard Brexit and no deal is done regarding research funding and student entitlements, the effects on Scotland’s universities could be utterly devastating.
The European Union has already shown it is ready to play hardball with its decision to start the withdrawal process for the European Medicines Agency and European Banking Agency to leave London. Not that you will read much about that in the right-wing media.
That’s well over 1,000 jobs and about £50m in tax income lost to the UK already. Unless some sort of deal over research is done quickly those figures will seem like buttons compared to the funding our universities in particular will lose.
The UK research sector has done quite brilliantly out of European Union funding over the years. Research and other academic fields in British universities are globally recognised as excellent, but that status is being threatened by Brexit because there is little doubt that unless some arrangement can be made between the remaining 27 member states and the UK government, then hundreds of millions of pounds of EU funding that goes to our research sector will simply disappear.
The leading 24 universities in the UK are part of the Russell Group which alone has seen 9,300 collaborative links supported by the EU Horizon 2020 programme.
No one seriously thinks such links will be severed but a hard Brexit will see them severely curtailed.
Students both from the UK and elsewhere in the EU will have their educational possibilities vastly reduced because the EU-funded Erasmus programme will no longer work for the UK.
And what will happen to students who just now are free to come here and study? That’s 86,000 students and staff in Russell Group universities alone.
In a hard Brexit, no one, but no one, can say what will happen to them.
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