Calyx72 Qualcheck - lucky you don't live here since you hate it so much. Same with many unionists it seems - can't stand Scotland and take every opportunity to talk us down.
I lived there for years and I just didn't like it. I didn't hate it, but unless you are very, very Scottish or want to live somewhere away from it all, its a hard culture to get used to. I'm mixed race, and I did find a lot of the comments about my appearance hard to deal with and rather rude. But what I found worse is in most European countries, you can have an interesting discussion about the problems (and attributes) of their countries without it descending into a childish diatribe where you will be accused of "hating" them or told to leave the country.
I also cannot abide the way that Sturgeon and Salmond and many other Scottish politicians are so very, very aggressive. They would be an utter embarrassment on the world stage. Kezia Dugdale is a breath of fresh air although I don't like her politics. Alex Salmond in particular seems to have descended into a misbelief that calling people little funny Scottish names like "bawbag" is a very clever way of discussing independence. And why do so many Scottish first ministers end up being sacked or having to resign under a cloud? Donald Dewar is the only one who left office not to be tainted by scandal!
As for the universities, they are chronically under-funded and extremely low contact hours with students are now the norm because theres just not enough staff to go round. Do you know that there is so little oversight of universities in Scotland that several Scottish university principals require all academic articles to be run past their departments first? If you control the output that academics produce, then you have a real problem in a country. Edinburgh University tried to give all its lecturing staff a 10% pay cut and loss of final salary pension schemes, which is why they went on strike earlier this year, affecting students' exams. Numbers of Scottish students going onto university are lower than ever because the universities need foreign students to make up their funding shortfall. Edinburgh is now full of new build student housing complexs because the university has borrowed so as to build it and benefit from the rents from said foreign students in years to come. Even college access courses and higher education for adult learners has been reduced due to lack of funding. Its a bit of a mess under the Scottish Government.
I often think its a shame that most Scots live in the central belt, because the rest of Scotland is so much nicer. But it lacks half decent transport links and there are hardly any jobs, and the SNP wants to centralise everything. Of course its the faults of the Clearances that all that culture was lost and I do think it would have been a fantastic country if that had not happened.