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

[Berlinerschnauzer]

So said my son’s dad on learning DS2 failed to be offered a place at Cambridge…
I don’t know enough to confirm whether it’s sour grapes or he actually has a point.
Was looking at figures for Oxbridge and was surprised to find that something like 60 odd percent of students (under and post grads) are international. For undergraduates it’s nearly a quarter.
Likewise Edinburgh has 30% international students and is one of the wealthiest unis.
Unlike lower tier unis which don’t have the same deep financial pockets and have to attract foreign students to survive, surely these unis don’t. They could be attracting home grown, talented students who in years to come will contribute massively to the economy rather than returning to their home countries and taking their skills with them. My question is does ex DP have a point or is he spouting bollocks
as per usual ?

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.

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 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.

. 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.

@Kindling1970 Thank you for answering my question.

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.

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.

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.

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.

EightisNewNine

Now look at the postgraduate statistics.

Its a very different picture

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.

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.

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.

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.

Was this at Oxford or Cambridge?

It's a bit more complicated than that. Two thirds of universities are in financial difficulties, with redundanies for academic staff and departments closing. That means fewer places overall and less choice for those who want to study subjects like music, modern foreign languages, archaeology and classics.

Compared to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford etc., Oxford and Cambridge have very small endowments so of course money is also a consideration (and the elite American US universities would happily continue to accept international students even if the UK decided to become ever more parochial).

We might think tuition fees sound expensive but apart from rising very slightly from £9,000 to £9,250 fees didn't go up since 2012, apart from the recently announced changes. So this £9000 in 2012 Monday is now worth about £6000 in today's money. In that time the cost of everything has ballooned - whole salaries in FE are still woeful they've had to go up a bit along with the cost of everything. It's rubbish but unis are really cash strapped (not opening the can of worms which is VC pay) which is why they're cutting back on courses. They can charge more for trendy courses like business studies masters degrees which attract more international students than humanities degrees will.

Money not Monday!

But it’s much harder for those students to stay afterwards, which is why it’s less attractive for many (apart from the super academic high flyers who can be sure of finding the sponsorship they need).

An Indian student can do a one year masters in the UK on a student visa, then transfer onto the two year graduate visa, hopefully find a sponsored job within the first year, and then it’s five years to permanent residency and another year for citizenship.

Postgraduate (H1B) work visas for international students are capped in the US - not everyone gets one. And there’s a far longer and less certain path to permanent status and eventually citizenship.

That same Indian student who could feasibly get UK citizenship within 8 years of arriving in the UK would be waiting decades for a green card in the US, and the whole time they’d be at risk of deportation if they ever got made redundant and couldn’t find a new position within something like 60 days.

It’s because international students massively subsidise local students. When I was in med school, my fees were about x5 more than my friends who paid between £2000-3000 a year. When I moved to my clinical years, I paid around £25,000 a year. What the local students paid didn’t even touch the sides. I don’t know about other degrees, but training a doctor is very expensive. Most international students also need higher grades to enter for the same subjects - I needed 3A’s back in 2005 for medicine but local students in my year group only needed 2A’s and a B so we’re not exactly buying our way in.

Tell your son's dad to stop whinging? The son failed to get in. Many student's apply and fail to get into Oxbridge....because they were considered not good enough. Lots of other students get into Oxbridge becauae they WERE considered good enough. The higher the number of international students the higher the number of home that can be subsidised.

So tell your son's dad that nobody owes your son anything. Thanks.

The answer to your question is because overseas students are charged significantly more in fees so they make more profit from them.

Universities need a huge overhaul. They offer way to many pointless courses and variations of courses which are nonsensically niche.

I really feel for students who graduate with debts of c.£50,000 from lower tariff universities. It does feel like they are being ripped off when they are paying the same as Oxbridge/Russell Group for an inferior experience. The contact hours argument is tricky. Arts and humanities subjects require intensive reading so high contact hours would not be welcome for most students.

Money. Why else? Their income per UK student hasn't gone up since fees started, what's inflation in that time?