Erasmus was never really threatened Dave, in fact Johnson said himself that we would not come out of Erasmus, he lied.
It’s the same as all the Brexit 'benefits’ not real. Yes of course students can still study in European universities, but it’s now not a right and requires visas and other hoops to jump through. Also they have obviously lost the EU erasmus funding.
Also the argument you make re still being able to study in Europe was always the case with American, Australian and other countries universities.
Sad to say, our students have missed out massively, it's a real shame. I know you disagree with this, we'll have to see how Turing turns out, hopefully well.
Of course again you are right that we were able to study in other nations as part of Erasmus but that was simply a small handful outside of the European Block and not any of the major Nations like Australia, America, Canada etc, Turin allows students to choose their preference globally and then apply for the grant, Erasmus was restricted to mainly European countries and a few neighboring ones with several outside of this like Israel and Egypt.
Erasmus only gave 15,000 in total opportunities and that is the total for all the EU members, Turin allows 35,000 UK students with larger grants of up to £10,000 not the 4k cap of Erasmus.
On the face of it no matter how you look at it, Turin is vastly better and saves 200million for the UK, it doesn't limit where you can study and it allows a greater grant for a vastly larger group.
Unless Turin somehow collapses then I see no really strong argument against it as a comparison.
On your other point, Yes Boris said we wouldn't leave Erasmus but the EU played dirty and was trying to force us to pay huge amounts to access research funds which included erasmus access, they basically were asking us to commit billions over several yrs or they will block access, Boris however simply said fine, we will start our own schemes and research funds... within days the media were chomping on how students were going to lose out here and it's a disaster .... seems another scaremongering tactic that failed and in reality Brexit allowed us to create a better system.
PS if we are on good terms with other nations then a visa is a simple application, not a biggy that it is often made out to be, so what if we now need a visa, we have used the visa system successfully globally for decades, Please expand on all these other hoops we have to leap through now, I constantly here about them but no one seems to be able to tell me what they are.