Foreign Students

[EmpressoftheMundane]

I was listening to a pod cast where professors wrote-in regarding concerns about foreign students. Reference: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/planet-normal/id1514949294
Discussion starts at 49.20 on podcast. (Earlier is a discussion about lockdowns.)

Professor complained his most recent cohort was 66% Chinese with only 3 UK students. He sited issues with language, cultures not mixing, and him having to dumb down teaching. He pursued the issue and the university basically said, we need the money. He felt the broader issues of this approach were to exclude our own citizens from education, training up our competition, ruining our own reputation for excellence in higher education, and a brain drain of some of our own human capital.

Do you think this is widespread? Do universities really need the money, or do they want the money?

This would explain the bun fights between state and private schools each claiming the other sector had grabbed all the places. It’s actually foreign students.

I am in a Russell Gp STEM School, not in London. Our UG population is over 1/3 Overseas.

As @Phphion described, we have separate targets each year for the Home and Overseas cohorts. There was a time when the Overseas students from certain countries had academic weaknesses, but now they are almost uniformly very strong academically. Language can be an issue, because it is possible to pass the necessary English language exams by cramming and then regress. This leads to social segregation. We as a School attempt to mitigate that, but it can be difficult.

Yes, we desperately need the financial contribution Overseas students bring. But we value their academic qualifications and dedication more.

This is what happens when universities have pitiful endowments and are basically living from hand to mouth.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
US university endowments list here (top of the list $$$ amounts are in billions).

Compare...

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_endowment
UK university endowments list here.
Only Oxford and Cambridge are in the £billions category.
The rest are in millions.

@mathanxiety Maybe put your hand in your pocket then?! We are not the USA. We don’t have a giving culture here. Only at the top few unis. The others don’t produce enough wealthy grads!

We cannot put even more money into HE via tax. We actually need a cull of courses and unis. We need to re-evaluate what HE should be and how long it should last. This would be a start.

I agree we need to re-evaluate HE, @TizerorFizz . But this needs to be in the context of creating more pathways to the middle class, not just economically but socially. This is the crux of the problem

To answer your questions @EmpressoftheMundane

1. universities need the money and are urged (that’s a euphemism) by government policy to recruit overseas students. The domestic tuition fee doesn’t cover costs.
2. There are different quotas for domestic and international students. International students don’t take domestic student spaces.

So all the increased foreign students are additional seats? Is this why we are hearing about accommodation shortages at so many universities? They increased places without building halls, etc.?

There is a glut of student accommodation in my town.

@EmpressoftheMundane The popular unis do have accommodation shortages. Prices for private rentals are very high after y1 in some cities. Most unis can accommodate y 1 students but admission numbers are not an exact science. A level results snd deferrals make a difference to accommodation availability.

The cap on student numbers was lifted around 10 years ago. This meant some universities expanded a lot. Of course they took more international students to get more money. So it’s been building up for 10 years. There are places at university though. It’s not as if all universities are competitive. Plenty are bums on seats ones.

@poetryandwine Our uni sector expanded a lot in the 60s. We had polytechnics. We had new universities. We did make many working class people middle class. Others took classes in the evening to study. Electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and all sorts of trades learnt this way. They also became middle class. There are routes out of poverty but school exam results still matter. And desire!

"Our uni sector expanded a lot in the 60s. We had polytechnics. We had new universities. We did make many working class people middle class. Others took classes in the evening to study. Electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and all sorts of trades learnt this way. They also became middle class. There are routes out of poverty but school exam results still matter. And desire!"

Yes to this. My father and father-in-law married and had children young in keeping with their social class at the time. Both established STEM careers thanks to evening classes, institutes of higher education, part-time courses funded by employers. My father-in-law ended up with a phD.

I can see that young people have few choices other than to go to uni. for many careers. There is no other path. Apprenticeships aren't available or desirable to all. Additionally, the death of evening classes and HNDs has been a barrier to young people getting back in to education and training when they grow up a bit and realise they need more skills to get a higher paid job. In fact, I'd even allow 6th form funding(level 3) for 4 years for up to 25 year olds.(is there any funding post 19 for level 3 qualifications?) They can use a FE college.

The situation is going to get worse with the loss of Btecs and the use of T levels which have higher entrance standards and will leave many young people with no post 16 education if they can't access a level 2 Btec.

The lifting of the cap on overseas students has been responsible for student rents rising in certain cities.

There never was a cap on overseas students? A shit-ton of anti-immigration rhetoric which is continuing, (and re-introduction of post study work visas thanks to Jo Johnson) but not AFAIK an actual cap on tier 4 visas.

@TizerorFizz The routes you cite were all once respected paths to the middle class, as they should be. But now some, such as polytechnics, have been absorbed into the university system and as@fortyfifty says, many others have been closed off.

IMO, we do not accord skilled tradespeople and craftspeople the social respect they deserve. Plumbers and electricians want their children to attend university in order to become truly middle class. It is absurd, really, when they do some of the most important work there is. (An extension of this is the contrast between the moderate social esteem accorded engineers in the UK and the high esteem accorded them in Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe.)

Agreed we have many routes out of poverty. People have come to link ‘middle class’ and ‘university graduate’ as social constructs and I think we’ve imported that mistake from America. I wish we would decouple them.

@titchy there certainly was a cap on international students at UG level when it came to HEFCE funding. There was also a cap on overall UG students admitted onto a particular programme.

HEFCE never funded overseas students The SNC was only ever applied to home students (with less than ABB - which of course excluded much of the RG...).

@titchy no HEFCE never funded international students - but it capped the numbers of international students as a percentage of UG students on a programme for a HE provider to qualify for home student UG funding/loans i.e. in order to remain a state funded university you couldnt admit say 60% international students on a UG programme. This was a while back i.e. in the 1990s but it was there. I clearly remember LSE/Imperial discussing how many international students they can admit on to UG programme and still count as a public funded university

I went to university a very long time ago....and I was the only Brit on my course. I saw it then, and still see it now, as an advantage, and have bumped into LSE alum all over the world.

DS was the only Brit out of 40 on his masters course. Again fine. People mixed and he now has a strong international network. DD now has experience of delivering group projects on-line (lockdown) with participants from different cultures in different time zones. If she decides on a career in research this will be invaluable.

It is important to define what the perceived problem is. Having some of the World’s best and brightest must be of advantage to our Universities.

However having courses stuffed with under qualified unmotivated students with poor language skills is of no use to anyone. There is Home Office concern about taught post grad courses (PG students can bring in dependents) perhaps becoming an immigration loophole.

A friend heads a department at a low tariff University where much to their surprise this years applications for their Masters course are 100 higher than expected. They are likely to accept all so it is more a case of finding rooms and teaching staff.

Apologies. I muddled up the lifting of the cap on student numbers.

As outline in the article on Australia - there are a few issues with having the majority of your students from abroad and generally China - though Indian students are catching up.

I teach social sciences and being able to read/write in English is very important plus social sciences are not really international and a lot of our Chinese students who did their first degree somewhere else just dont have the necessary intellectual background ( doesnt mean they arent bright but they simply know as much about Western intellectual thought as our home students) to cope. For our home students - there is a also massive social aspect to it i.e. it's quite a thing to be studying with kids of millionaires.

My uni is aware that we are overly dependent on our international students but what can they do. Furthermore, courses that attract a lot of international students will get boosted at the expense of others which does create a discussion regarding what type of degrees we should offer and to whom.

I am increasingly feeling like my university has become a bit of a finishing school for the global or Chinese elites. Yes, they pay a lot in our terms but looking at their Gucci for them 20k is basically just a hand bag plus an expensive jacket and some trainers. The level of wealth is absolutely phenomenal

Essentially yes.... international students aren't taking all the places away from UK students. And yes, universities need the money and in the current climate a lot of that money is going to have to come from international fees.

The accommodation issue will vary. Some places have lots of accommodation whereas some places don't. Some university own accommodation, some don't 🤷🏼‍♀️

Whilst international students dont technically take away places from home students - when it comes to deciding which programmes to shrink or expand, student recruitment clearly plays a role. So it's not completely true to say that international students dont impact on module choices

@poetryandwine As DH is CEng we do see the problems with engineering in this country. Mainly because someone who repairs a dishwasher is called an “engineer”. In other countries, CEng is a protected status that is valued. Here it is not.

As the product of a HNC at a poly (now a university) I firmly believe work and study is a better avenue for many. I then studied part time for professional qualifications. The degree holders were not better then me. Younger! Not better! As I worked I found the course easy(ish). Common sense.

Getting a job with study is a great way to progress. However sometimes the colleges of FE are not good enough. We need the unis that were colleges of HE to offer a broader spectrum of work related part time courses below degree level. Also stop pretending some degrees are worth having. Work and other qualifications are worth more. Giving more people a chance to work themselves up via an academic HE college is better. However good enough GCSEs are vital. I don’t want an electrician with poor reading skills to do that job!

Working and studying is fine but mainly works in countries where employers invest in skill training. The UK is behind most of Europe when it comes to that. Thats why apprenticeships dont work in this country - employers expect people to already have the skills when they are hired. Furthermore, in the UK you make your career by changing employers i.e. thats the best way to get promoted/get a payrise so there is not incentive for employers to invest in training when people leave but equally employers dont value people staying with the same employer over new hires so there are no incentives for people to stay. Hence the UK struggles with non- degree based skills development

I know someone whose daughter was at a girls' boarding school where at teh weekend if she stayed she was the only non Chinese girl there and everyone else spoke Chinese only at the weekend so a bit isolating for her. We have 600,000 net immigration now and a lot of that is students which the UK may well want but it certainly comes with making the property for rent situation worse, more crowds etc . We have never had so many people coming to the UK - we seem to be the most popular the UK has ever been in its history.

I suspect for home students we need to get back to only about 20% going to university not 50% as students are taking on loan debt they don't need. I am not sure my mother was a worse teacher of 6 year olds through her career because she did 2 years of residential teacher training from age 17 and was teaching aged 19 than had she done A levels, a degree and a PGCE.

Not sure the 50% is all 18 year olds. The adults are in there too!

We probably need to be honest that some students simply are not great employees after they graduate. There is such a difference between grads. Not necessarily uni attended. Lots of factors make some grads excellent and others are not.

I do think we need to accept some Dc are not suitable for uni. Employers would be better off training them as Dc study towards qualifications. We actually were required to stay put or we paid the fees back! I don’t really see that outsiders are better than a workforce you have trained. Many jobs don’t require a degree. We need to accept that and train Dc accordingly with portable valued qualifications. That way, poorer people could stay local(ish) and access a good job snd training,

Fun fact - teaching (and nursing) became degree professions in order to narrow the male/female degree attainment gap.

So although your mother (and mine) Xenia probably were exactly the same as those teachers with a degree, who wants to go back to boys jobs being regarded as professional and girls jobs not.