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........

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