DS probably dropping out of uni. DH horrified.

OuiasMaisBon

We are assuming that the other students in this boy's corridor are leaving him out, or are deliberately excluding him. But we have this only at third-hand - the OP telling us, what her DS tells her. I can't help wondering if the DS is projecting his own insecurities onto those he encounters. Unless they've said "Go away. You can't join our group" or something equally childish, we have the DS's impression that he is unwelcome.

Unfortunately (and I know this from my own experience of shyness and overcoming it), it's generally the shyness of someone like the OP's DS, almost expecting to be excluded.

And as WhatwouldRonDo says, a big Northern university is not necessarily the answer.

The answer is for the DS to overcome his shyness, and examine his (likely inherited from the OP) prejudices and assumptions.

HouseholdWords It's OK, not to worry about gobalisation, because Brexit.

No, HouseholdWords, no one is saying disgraceful things about Chinese students per se , they are questioning the language ability of some and, in the case of the OP, worrying about her ds to whom the students don't seem to be welcoming. Leaving someone out is mean, whatever country you come from. Admitting students with sub-standard language skills is the fault of the institution.

I do not understand why posters are painting Northern universities as somehow intrinsically different and more nurturing / exciting than those elsewhere in the country. I am a northerner, and proud of the identity / culture that attaches to me but when my DD decided on a northern university I didn't think oh great, she is returning to God's own country where she will encounter only warm friendly down to earth people who will welcome her to their bosoms for all her quirks. Of course northern universities have their fair share of excluding cliques coming from all over the country, and their social life is no different (literally the same brands like vodka revs, even Yates has gone south now). It sounds like OP son is in danger of being encouraged to think it is the answer.

Imperial does have an issue with the gender mix and geek count but since the nearby music and drama schools have a similar issue with the reverse gender mix and arty farty count they do tend to find each other if they are looking and it can even out.

Chestervase it's fairly simple - in the process of learning to use another language at a very high & specialised level, often reading, writing, speaking, and comprehension improve at different rates.

I'm sure you had this experience when you learnt another language?

I do feel sorry for OP's ds, because moving is a big decision. I think a lot of people take their loneliness with them everywhere, and for others it's just plain bad luck and they would thrive anywhere else. It's difficult to know if it would be out of the frying pan and into the fire. Campus universities do offer more in the way of social opportunities, but how horrendous if a student moved to one and found that that place too wasn't all it was cracked up to be?

I honestly think all this "off to uni" business has got a bit out of hand and the expectations that come with it are leading people to feel at best short-changed and at worst very depressed if they don't find this huge group of bosom friends within five minutes.

I have always wondered this. If the students on a course don’t speak English how do they access the course and lectures. How do they write their dissertations. Genuinely don’t understand.

All of you saying disgracefully xenophobic things about Chinese students: when working in a second (or probably 3rd or 4th language), one's comprehension is often far better than ones speaking and/or writing ability. But these improve vastly.

As for students making complaints about other students, because of their ethnicity!

I despair - just how are these British students going to cope in a globalising work place?

We have Russell Group unis up North, you know. Haven’t read full thread but if changing is possible he should do it.
Or grit his teeth and expand his circle where he is.
Or, as my SIL did, drop out. But she has stuck at her accountancy qualifications and , despite having no degree, has just qualified as an accountant - she went on a bank training programme. She’s a fantastic example of doing brilliantly outside uni. And she’s a lovely, rounded, funny, kind, interesting person (as well as a geek).

Dapplegrey (yawn - from previous encounters) If a Chinese mother came on the thread said her child was excluded by 5 British students and came out with a similar diatribe of hyperbole denigrating British students, including accusations that I know for a fact to be untrue then yes I would accuse her of racism. It would not be unlikely either as Chinese culture has its own ingrained issues of xenophobia, see Frank Dikotter's The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Surprise, surprise xenophobia is not a British or even western phenomenon. Your "other" may see you as an "other" too.

However as pp has pointed out whilst integration is problematic there are things that a student can do. Both my DDs shared with Chinese students in first year. In one case, a London university, though all British they had diverse backgrounds and there was no issue. They included him in a "Come Dine with me" evening" where they all had chance to show that their diverse backgrounds could be a positive and that broke down the barriers. My other daughter in the North was sharing with other British students who all came from towns in South / Eastern England with little immigration where they had had little experience of other cultures and they had no clue how to include the Chinese student and assumed he stayed in his room because he wanted to. My DD having lived in China made an effort to include him, the rest were more than glad to include him once the ice was broken and he remained part of their flatshares when they moved out as well.

Ladyincement So you are a cheat, but then cheating is not confined to one culture is it? Which is why there are processes in place to stop it..... A others have said it is in nobody's interests to admit students who will fail

The new intake stats for Imperial that people have linked to don't actually represent the make-up of the population as a whole. They are stats for the new intake, including both undergraduate and postgraduate. The international student intake will be heavily weighed towards the postgraduate side, and a large number of those students will on one-year Master's programmes. The majority of British students, on the other hand, will be doing undergraduate programmes of at least three years in duration. Hence the overall number of British students as a proportion of the total student body will be significantly higher than the new intake statistics suggest.

He should go to a less pushy uni- top 10 would work if less an aim for the internationals , if he’s smart, attractive and tall he would fit in well at Lancaster. He’d be popular in a snap !

It wouldn’t set him up for life career wise - I have a BA and MA from a Top 5 uni , without experience I am unemployable and overqualified.

He's considering changing university because no one on his corridor speaks English to him? Seriously?

University is not school. He's a grownup. He can make friends elsewhere.

Imperial don’t have catered halls. LSE is the only other university in the UK that has a similar student profile.

The issue of Chinese students not integrating is well understood by universities and a number of strategies have been tried to improve this, although I am not aware of any that have been hugely successful. There are a couple of problems that contribute to this. Firstly IELTS 6.5 min 6 which is what Imperial requires for most UG degrees is not super high. It’s good enough to do a maths degree but it’s not full fluency. Secondly, Chinese students tend to score very well in reading and writing and less well in speaking and listening. This means they achieve the average score needed but not the overall. Thirdly thirdly have often been taught by non native English speakers and struggle to understand accented English in normal speech. They are also often shy and uncomfortable at speaking in case they say things wrong and that combined with other cultural differences does make it very difficult for many.

You of course see clustering of other nationalities- it is exhausting to speak in your second language all the time. But other countries often don’t have the critical mass to allow this. Or students are from places like Singapore or hong king where they are essentially bilingual.

Students need to pass a visa interview in English before they come as well which should weed people out.

I suspect there are a small number of people who pay for fake English language credentials (tricky to forge) or for ringers to take tests (this was happening with TOEFL a while ago) but it’s rare. I genuinely think most of the students are at the required standard when they arrive. I think some students actually lose English skills through lack of practice after arrival though.

None of this means that these students are not entitled to study at these universities. But I do think that the unis have a responsibility to help them integrate better.

Back to the OPs son. The one thing I will say is that it is very very common for students to have a blip at about this time of year. After the excitement of the first few weeks has worn off and when real life starts to settle in. It is often combined with freshers flu and the darker, colder nights. It is a recognised phenomenon- there is even a graph! www.google.co.uk/search?q=culture+shock+cycle&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari#imgdii=nlZml_Hi-Nfw9M:&imgrc=7aB54Dj0xCRpkM:

I would try and get him to stick it out until Christmas. it’s still only a few weeks into term and hopefully he will find his tribe. The accommodation move should help and if it doesn’t he could reassess at that point.

Hmmmm. First of all OP you may have got a different set of responses if you'd posted in the Higher Education section - "Further Education" tends to be FE Colleges etc. There are some very expert academics posting in the HE section who may not have seen this pthread.

But anyway ...

Your opening post is quite a jumble of lots of stuff. It feels as though you're absorbing your DS's panic & upset, and replaying it in your own reactions.

My first thought is that maybe your DS is not ready for university.

My second thought is that you (or him?) don't say anything much about how he's enjoying (or not) his actual course.

There's a lot of projection of his own shyness onto others. It's verging on a kind of xenophobia to attribute part of his problem to overseas students. They are obviously hugely clever to get to the place your DS is at (either Imperial or LSE from your 1st post?) in another language and totally different culture. I'd say their "cliqueyness" is shyness and anxiety not to offend.

If it's your DS's shyness which is making him suicidal, then he really really needs to seek help. CBT or some other coping therapy is necessary. I remember being paralysingly shy when I started university - I was 18 months younger than most, and had rarely caught a bus before I moved from rural isolation to a big city university.

But I got over it. I womanned up - I grew up, and I found ways of learning how to deal with my shyness. As a young woman at university 30 years ago, I also had to learn to really speak up - I didn't have any privilege of masculinity (or height or good looks) as your DS has.

What are his interests? Can he join a club or society - again, it'll be hard at first, but he'll meet a couple of people like him.

But the bottom line really is - wherever he goes, he takes himself with him. A move to Newcastle (excellent city, excellent university) won't suddenly cure his shyness. And what if his girlfriend dumps him?

Can he get involved in other aspects of his hall of residence? There's usually a Dean of students & sub-deans resident in London halls (especially LSE ones) - they'll have seen it all before. He could talk to one of these senior residents confidentially. They might be able to introduce him to other students. In my experience of years of freshers, they very rarely only socialise with their flat, kitchen or corridor. There will have been lots of stuff put on in Freshers Week for just this purpose - to get people mixing.

I'm afraid I think your son is projecting his own fears, anxieties and fear of failure onto other things. BUt if he's been brought up with such an all-or-nothing view: top 3 in the world for his course, or something. Anyway, a degree from here would set him up for life career wise from you and/or his father, then no wonder he's so anxious.

Maybe he needs to take another year out from university - he really needs to find a way to overcome his pathological shyness.

I'm trying to be helpful here, although you'll probably read my whole post as harsh and nasty as you have reprimanded deckoff - whose advice is tough but sensible. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but there are some nasty goady things in your first post about other students, and then we get this in a subsequent post about Chinese students:
They go home with an English degree which is very prestigious, the English uni gets pots of money. It is a scandal and will eventually be exposed by a budding journalist one day.

You're upset for your son, but this is just goady racism, and both you & he are using it as an excuse for his unhappiness from the sounds of it. I've taught a lot of Chinese students over the years - and I am in awe of them. They cope not just in a language but a whole bloody alphabet that is very very different from their own native languages (most Chinese students speak at least 2 usually 3 languages before English); they are undertaking an expensive education in a culture and educational culture also totally different from their own. The Chinese students I teach are extremely bright, very motivated, and work insanely hard - and are quite a lot of fun, once you can get into a bit of sympathy with them - but they are deferential and shy because they are afraid of losing face, saying the wrong thing, or offending. I love teaching them - and I hope they go back to China with just a little bit of an understanding of the chaos and creativity of the West - and value it.

And the huge fees they pay are subsidising your DS, don't forget.

I think you need to stop projecting onto your son, and enabling his shyness.

It wasn't uncommon even back then for people to switch to other universities, for my contemporaries because, well, the social mix was limited. Nerdy or excessively hearty mostly. As I said, I loved it. But it wasn't a typical experience I think.

This thread seems to focus heavily on Chinese students and some of the ops language is bordering on offensive, when I’d have thought she would focus more heavily on the son in question.

Anyways, International student stats by uni link below. If this kid is at imperial then it’s 23 percent, which is pretty much the highest in the uk and still puts 77 percent British.

www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/international/international-students-the-facts/by-university/

Dottysheep

State intake to Cambridge is 62%, even if it were 20 years ago it would have been 50% so it’s simply not true that most of your peers were public/private school and wealthy.

I haven't read the full link, MoreCheerfulMonica, but who is to know who has sat the test? I mean, if I was sent a form asking about my proficiency in another language, I could pay someone to fill it in or take a test. If my parents had the dosh for a place at a UK university, they surely could fork out a few £££ to get around this.

Someone I know was teaching the Chinese students English at local RG university. This implies that teaching is thought necessary!

I went to Imperial and loved it. The make up of the student body has changed a lot in the last 20 odd years. 2/3 of all students are indeed from overseas (although that includes postgrads).

I suppose universities can't get rid of high-paying students because it is a) bad publicity that they admitted them in the first place and b)would discourage others from applying there and the last thing they want is to cut off an oil well in full flow.

Universities fail students who do not meet academic expectations, regardless of their country of origin and fee status. It is absolutely ludicrous to claim otherwise.

It is far worse in the medium term for a university to allow an unqualified student to graduate than to fail them.

BTW a much higher fraction of postgraduate students are international at all universities.

When a poster has factual errors in their posts, it is hard to take all the details seriously.

Click here for a breakdown of Imperial students by nationality:

www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/strategic-planning/statistics/trend-analysis/student-nationality/

It is true that 2/3 of imperial students are non-British - but this includes postgraduate students, who are not usually in halls. Postgraduate students represent 30% or so of Imperial's students. So at undergraduate level much more than 1/3 of students are British.

Across all students, 17% (not 33%) are Chinese.

For those who think this analysis is heartless towards OP's son: without understanding what the problems really are you can't solve them. It is quite unlikely that he is the only British student within the accommodation block, so part of the issue is difficulties in meeting and making friends with others. This won't necessarily trivially solve itself in another university - although certainly another environment might well work better for him. London universities are very different from universities in smaller cities.