Why do our most prestigious and wealthiest Unis accept so many international students ?

Was this at Oxford or Cambridge?

The current students I know also confirm that many of the chinese students have extremely poor / unintelligible English and hardly speak in tutorials.
There is a whole cottage industry geared towards faking the necessary English language qualifications.
Once onto the degree of their choice, they pay students with better English or tutors (private / outside the uni system) to teach them in their native language and assist them with coursework that must be completed in English.

You may not like it but foreign elites (or those from the colonies at the time -- was that still foreign?) have attended Cambridge and Oxford for centuries.

You’re allowed to ask questions on your own behalf OP, you don’t have to pretend it’s down to something your DH said.

Interesting and valid point on international applications being more competitive.

On Hong Kong and Singapore: no, anyone can apply, and many do. Applications aren’t screened or blocked by the school or government or anything like that.

EightisNewNine

Now look at the postgraduate statistics.

Its a very different picture

most unis do it because they have to, to balance the books. Imperial and UCL for example take about 60% from overseas on some undergrad courses. An awful lot of those come from China. If China changed their rules to stop their citizens applying, some UK unis would be in serious financial trouble

Oxford and Cambridge are a special case - they are so stinking rich that a few hundred more or fewer international students each year will make no significant difference to their finances. They tend to to take about 25-30% from overseas at undergrad but that is a deliberate choice, not a financial necessity. Shifting that percentage by about 10% would bring in an extra 10 million or so, but relative to investment returns on their endowment, that's pocket money.
I've also seen allusions to the fact that St Andrews try to keep their undergrad mix roughly 1/3 scotland 1/3 rest of UK 1/3 international as a deliberate choice.

So much nonsense on this thread

www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/publications/ug_admissions_statistics_2023_cycle.pdf

Cambridge 2023 admissions numbers - international students are 35% of applications, but only 25% of offers, so the international places are more competitive (10% success rate vs 20% for home students).

And while China provides 30% of applicants, 20% are EU and 10% English speaking countries (US, Canada, Aus, NZ).

Interesting is that the success rate for the 15% of "not China" applicants (Honkong, Singapore) is double the typical one, but I heard they have popular but extremely selective scholarship programme, so probably just the sending of application is more competitive step there.

The number of applications from Russia or gulf countries is quite small.

Edinburgh currently running a voluntary redundancy scheme because the international students who subsidise the UK students have stopped coming in the required numbers.
Even many of the wealthy and prestigious unis are in deficit.

Hi I’m a lecturer in higher education at a prestigious uni. The department I am in is hammered constantly and we don’t have enough academics to cover teaching and assessment when this is balanced against the research focus as well. We are constantly chasing our tails to stay on top of workload. However…I’m not sure that’s the case everywhere or even in every dept at the uni I work in.
Finance and economics are not my area but I assume there’s a lot that could be trimmed to put the uni in a better position. however it’s the staff wage bill that will be trimmed and if we lose staff on the courses I work on, we are stuffed. I need to work way beyond the ‘set’ hours constantly in order to complete everything as I do so much teaching. That leaves little time in the working week for planning, assessment, supporting students. this part of the job has exploded - even with the army of student advisors and support that is available. Understandably they want to talk to someone they have a relationship with if things are going wrong at uni or privately. universities are not very happy places currently.

@Kindling1970 Thank you for answering my question.

. But there just aren’t significant numbers of British students applying. I assume because there is little funding to support them and it’s expensive. Whereas these international students seem to have the funds (family money, government funding?) to pay the fees.

In the up we have a long established system of graduate training programs that take straight from undergraduate and train for pretty much all of the professional occupations. A masters gets you very little, there's not a great earnings premium for doing one. It's actually often easier to get on to a postgraduate program at the top universities than it is to get in as a undergraduate.

For overseas students a masters from a UK university is a meal ticket to a well paid job, and that's without considering the visa & work opportunities it gives you for the UK.

I thought the same thing when my DC started at an Oxbridge college. There were 6 students on their course at their college, of whom 3 were British. I thought of all their equally well-qualified friends at school who had applied to Oxbridge and not got places. However I think all the explanations given above are correct.

There are related articles from 2019 here and here, and a 2021 one here, although the last one is Covid-related.

This article says 23% of undergraduates and 65% of postgraduates at Oxford are international. I think those are the figures the OP is using: less than a quarter of undergraduates is better than I expected.

While international fees may be a factor, the short answer is that British students don’t measure up internationally. I have firsthand experience of this. Oxbridge grad and from the school in another country that recently outranked Eton as Oxbridge’s No 1 feeder school.

Despite being a state school with mostly government subsidised fees and open to all, my alma mater was misreported as a private school by the British press - to much outrage on Twitter and Mumsnet about rich international students IIRC. Brits simply can’t wrap their minds around the idea that you don’t have to pay wadloads of money to get a good education.

In Britain, because the best pre-university education is open to the richest rather than the brightest, the Oxbridge crop is also less promising. Generally it’s observed by international students that their British peers at Oxbridge have posh accents, massive amounts of confidence and not much else. Not to use too broad a brush of course; I’ve met plenty of brilliant British students in my time.

Besides which, in fields like Mathematics and Science, if you pluck any average student back home out, they’re literally years ahead of British students. The pace and complexity of the curriculum is totally different.

I'm a programme lead at a middling uni - I am only allowed to timetable each cohort 208 contact teaching hours a year. Any more than that and apparently the course makes a loss. That rule is for every single course at the university I am told. No idea if that's true for medicine, pharmacy, etc but it's certainly true for health profession courses such as nursing.

International students have to attend pretty
much all classes or else their visa will be taken away and universities need to make sure attendance is religiously recorded. This university were breaking visa rules and could shut down if caught

I’ve found that not all but lots of the international students can’t speak English well at all. They do get tested but this is done online before they get here so lots suspect that they cheat by getting someone else to sit the test.

This has been a problem for ages

Going back to the first days of fees, there were originally plans to charge higher fees for more prestigious, over-subscribed courses and institutions. I can't remember who nixed the proposal.

I think the situation varies between courses - medicine is an extremely involved course and it would be impossible to make it past the first year without very good language skills - but many courses are less intense, particularly one year masters courses.

My daughter is doing a masters at UCL currently and is having a very different experience to you. Her cohort is largely Chinese, and many of them seem to have extremely poor English language skills.

She has had to spend weekends rewriting international students’ contributions to group projects, because the level of English was so poor that you couldn’t understand what they were trying to say - she suspects they wrote their sections in Chinese and then fed them through an online translator.

And she’s also had issues where she’s been grouped with 2-3 Chinese students on a project and they’ve refused to speak to her in English, making it impossible for her to participate.

The professors seem to have given up on mixed groups now, and just tacitly group students by nationality, which is a real shame.

The same could be said if Tesco went bust.

Not really.
The customers of Tesco would continue to shop in the local are.
University students would stop spending money locally so it wouldn't just impact the university.

£££££££!!!

Tell that to all the students in the middle of their degrees at that University and all the people and who are made redundant. Lots of businesses would probably go under too because students are no longer living in the town.
It wouldn't necessarily be the university's you think should go under that will go under either.

It's both. Foreign students bring in the most income

Some cities would be devastated if the university shut as many local businesses stay open due to students spending money

Partly it’s money, partly it’s because they want the best students they can get - which gives them first pick of the best research talent, and helps them maintain their reputation.

On the bright side, they take a lot more students than they used to, so more people get to go.

If your dc really wants it, take a year off and reapply. It sometimes works