Volume of International Students

[Gettingtooldforthis]

Apologies for name change, long term mumsnetter here.

We are evaluating Unis at the moment, I was interested in how many International students there are by Uni & found this:

www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/student-advice/where-to-study/international-students-at-uk-universities

Does anyone know if you can find out how this breaks down by course?

Relatively easy to Google “admissions policy”

Here is Imperial

www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/registry/academic-governance/public/academic-policy/admissions/22-entry/Undergraduate-admissions-policy_2022.pdf

They claim to treat ALL applicants equally. So no ringfencing for home students.

I like the way they suggest that the minimum entry age is 13. DD came across a couple of (international) Imperial students during one of her extracurricular activities. They were 13 but sensibly relying on extracurricular with kids of their own age for their social life.

At the university where I work, each course has a separate pool for British students and international applicants.

So there are x number of places for British students and the British applicants compete for those places. And there are y number of places for International students and the International applicants compete amongst themselves for those places. There is no direct competition between a British student and an International student in that sense.

The setting of numbers for the British and International pools for each course is a somewhat complicated process, taking into account demand, quality of applicants / students, income generation and what this income might be spent on at course level (e.g., the income from International students might be earmarked to pay for more staff) and at university level (e.g., medium and long-term plans to build more accommodation and other facilities), how many International students other courses want and how this relates to the physical capacity of the university and its aspirations as a university in the world.

International students are inevitably a heterogeneous group. Some will want to mix with British students, some will prefer to seek out others from their own country. All universities with a lot of International students will acknowledge that there can be issues with International students splitting off into their own single nationality / linguistic groups and, while acknowleding that this may be their preference and may have some emotional and sometimes practical benefits, see this as an undesirable outcome for the students themselves, other students and the university as a whole. It is a difficult balancing act.

Courses with a lot of International students usually do a lot of behind-the-scenes work to promote some degree of mixing between British and International students in an academic setting (which is all they can control). As an example, we set seminar groups and small groups up carefully to balance the numbers of British and International students, rather than just letting people choose or doing it alphabetically which we have seen leads to the creation of almost exclusively single nationality groups due to where their names fall in the English alphabet.

As various academics on this thread have already said, several times, there are separate quotas for UK and international students. All students are held to equivalent entry standards. We have quite detailed conversion systems for matriculation qualifications which are not A Levels, Highers, or the IB.

And generally, international students need slightly higher levels of qualification than Home students. Biased or favourable treatment of international students because they pay the full cost (plus a premium for some degree courses) would be unethical and illegal.

@Phphion outlines the complex internal planning processes which each university undertakes to determine the number of places for each degree it offers. Before the cap was removed, these quotas were determined by the national government and universities were fined for overreaching.

In my department, we’re already starting to look at the planning for the 2024-25 academic year. The target numbers for admission to each of the degrees we offer for 2023-24 are already set.

This thread contains some distasteful xenophobia and othering of international students, and it’s not coming from the academics who’ve posted.

My general view is outside London at most of the universities with which we have contact at undergraduate level most students are home students. There is certainly a separate issue of where home students prefer to be - in London or not etc. Where we live most people are not white and there were not many white boys in my sons' school and some of their friends eg went to Warwick as more racially mixed at university than, say, Exeter. It would be a pity if home students split at 18 based on where those from their background go however and even Bristol where my youngest sons went is fairly racially mixed although for them a whole new rorld of people like us - something they had never experienced before by the way which was quite interesting - to become the norm rather than the weird white "other" which perhaps they were at school.......

@Gettingtooldforthis I work at a University with a high intake of International students.
The most popular and highly competitive are courses like : Comp Sci & other STEM coursesEconomics, Business & Management, Law, International Relations, psychology etc. Obvs Medicine & Dentistry too but the places are strictly controlled for International students on those courses due to Govt funding.

To find out specific breakdowns of number of applicants vs offers, you can lodge a Freedom of Information request.

I would say unless your son is predicted 3 A stars and has at least 8 x 8/9s in his GCSEs, he would be unlikely to be offered a place where I work, unless he would qualify for an Contextual offer.

Unfortunately, due to having so many applicants with this grade profile, most Home applicants meeting the minimum requirements on these highly competitive courses don’t really have a chance of being offered a place.

It is unfair as some schools over predict and their students get the offers.

It is unfair as some schools over predict and their students get the offers.

That's why Unis like Imperial or Oxbridge have all applicants take assessments and interviews.

So long as students meet the basic course requirements, it shouldn't matter whether they have been over-predicted or not. Or are you suggesting the predictions are used to rank students in order? I don't think so.

My son was predicted four A's, which he was capable of if he worked incredibly hard, but he got A AAA in the end because he had lots of extra-curricular and work-life balance. Was that an over prediction? Not really, because the predictions were made in the summer of year 12, based on end of year results, and the school didn't know how hard he and others were going to work in year 13. In any case, the course requirement was only A* AA, so his achieved grades were more than enough. It was a very competitive uni and course (similar acceptance rates to Oxbridge), so would have had lots of applicants with suitable grade predictions, but it was his personal statement and reference gave him the edge, not the grades.

Correction: My son was predicted four A Stars, which he was capable of if he worked incredibly hard, but he got A-star AAA.

Also worth mentioning that UCAS instruct schools in their guidance to predict the most positive achievable outcomes. Unfortunately some schools don't follow the guidance.

Similar here - my twins were predicted three A stars as they got 4 a stars in their AS levels (the highest you can get in AS levels). So the school were not wrong but I don't think the twins or I thought they were likely to get A stars and that was correct in the end but they did not try Oxbridge and they got the grades needed for their Bristol BSc and BA respectively.

They got "4 As" (not 4 A stars) in AS levels I was intending to write....

@denimia yes, for very competitive courses with few spaces for Home students, predicted grades are used to rank and do determine who get offers. There are limited spaces so it would not be possible to offer a place to everyone predicted to meet the requirements.
For very competitive courses, think thousands of applicants for less than 100 places. There has to be a way to reduce the number of offers.
Each course has different offer requirements depending on how many applicants and how many places are available.
So in your example, being predicted all A stars would mean your dc was offered a place over an applicant who was predicted to achieve the requirements, even though the offer would be at the standard requirement, depending on how competitive the course was.
The OP was asking about Comp Sci which is one of the most competitive courses we have and predicted grades make a big difference.

As you can imagine, it wouldn’t be possible to read thousands of personal statements, so often predicted grades and achieved GCSEs carry much more weight.

I truly believe there should be a terms breathing space. Student results in August. First semester post Christmas. Everyone students and university staff would have more time, students would amass more savings, university more time to study prospective students

It's an obscene rush for everyone as it stands

Then its inevitably an imperfect process, because all schools do their predictions differently.

Ours had a very transparent process, using statistics from previous years to back it up, but its underlying principle was to predict the most positive realistic outcome, in line with UCAS recommendations. They also make sure every student has a less aspirational contingency choice so they don't end up with nothing. (My son had offers from courses needing two A stars but decided not to firm them because he knew that one A star was in the bag, but two was a risk).

I'd ignore school prediction, teacher off the hook, let the actual results count.

Except @denimia, except. If ones school predicts, say AAB, but tell the child 'you are capable of an A but not there yet, so it's a B', and the uni wants three As, then they will miss out on an offer if another school would have said AAA under the same conditions as they think the child will be able to work themselves up to an A in the six months before the exam! Both schools feel the child capable of an A, but one is being more cautious. The child may well go on to get the three As, but too late, no offer so no place.
Of course there are other factors, but I don't think you can know that YOUR child's 4A star predictions for a course requiring A star AA didn't sway the uni into an offer - surely it would have! It is only logical that they would go with a student with higher predictions than one who just meets them on a competitive course. Your argument would make more sense if your child was predicted LESS or at the required grades but got in on other factors.

Or just get the results back earlier, as happens in most EU countries I know.

In Germany students apply for Uni by 15th July, with results in hand. The semester starts in October. Easy!

Both schools feel the child capable of an A, but one is being more cautious.

I think you're just underlining what I said, which is that all schools do it differently. Neither is wrong or right, it just comes down to having confidence in the predictions. But they should follow ucas guidance and err on the positive side.

I think our school was right to have confidence in my son's ability to get four A stars, because he's bright enough and if he'd spent more time revising he could have achieved that - he just didn't want it or need it badly enough to give up all his extra-curricular stuff. Another student in the same situation would have behaved differently and got 4 A Stars. Schools can't predict behaviour with certainty or make value judgements about how behaviour will evolve in year 13 (and especially when they have only known them a few months rather than since they were in year 7).

Eh? Think you're confusing me with someone else.

I have no issue with the OP's post - I was objecting to pps who thought that anyone interested in knowing the numbers of international students at a uni was a racist.

It is absolutely not the case that all competitive courses rank applicants by predicted grades and don't read personal statements.

In my department, around a third of applicants predicted 3 x A stars are rejected. We have enough offers to make to offer to all of them, but we don't. They do have a higher chance of receiving an offer, because predicted grades are one of the things we take into consideration. But not the only thing. We are quite clear about this, as universities should be.

Thank you. Interesting that Imperial seems to buck the trend that others, e.g. @Phphion helpfully describe, in that Imperial doesn't ringfence, whereas some others do.

I guess the only way to find out then, if there is no 'standard' approach, is to check the admissions policies of any uni interested in?

And undergrads at 13! Eek!

Would love to know where you work, so my ds doesn't waste an option applying for it! As he got 5 9s, an 8 (1 mark off a 9!) and 3 7s (the 7s in irrelevant subjects for what he wants to study). So good grades that show he's very good at STEM - but if a minimum of 8 8s-9s are needed, then I wish that would be public knowledge, so students can avoid applying (unless contextual factors apply, which they wouldn't in his case as he goes to an OK state school, nothing special but not failing either).

I would not be so sure that that Imperial statement rules out them having different British and International pools. It is basically identical to the one where I work and we certainly do.

If you are interested in Imperial, you can download an excel file at the bottom of this page: Download undergraduate admissions statistics that provides statistics to 2021 on applicants, offers and enrollments for each course broken down by Home / EU / International fee status.

I agree. As I said upthread DDs belief, based on attending a high achieving sixth form offering both day and boarding, was that Imperial was marginally easier for home over international students. As in the international student went to UCL, whereas the majority in her friendship group went to Imperial.

The UCL student is now studying for a PhD so on one level he did fine. Socially he struggled a little, as students from his home country perceived him as English and the English seem to have assumed he was cliquey, rather than shy. A pity as he is lovely and was well liked at school. Perhaps the take away from this thread should be that many international students are happy to mix. In the first term they are likely to be even more overwhelmed than home students, far from home: different climate, different weather, different food, different culture. No wonder the temptation is to cling to the familiar. A bit of effort on a home student's part could lead to lifelong and rewarding friendships.