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.

Yes. DD had a higher than advertised international cohort on her fashion course some years ago. I think the objections come from British students not being able to access the courses when they are more than qualified to do so. It’s an unforeseen addition to the lottery!

2017 is a long time ago. But yes, certainly some STEM courses at IC are now majority International.

In STEM we incur a loss for every Home student we accept. TBF IC runs some courses that may be particularly expensive and to this extent I have some sympathy. Also, their International cohort is superbly qualified, whereas since the beginning of the pandemic A Level results have been notably higher than previously. This has led the top tier in STEM perhaps to wonder about the reliability of the results. It will be interesting to observe the Home/International ratio at IC this year, as we are supposed to return to 2019 A Level grade distributions.

I agree things are out of balance, but the answer is either to raise fees or to change the funding model. Will the British public buy into that? Will you?

Mine graduated from the LSE and from Imperial respectively. DS was the only British student our of 39 on his Masters course and even his undergraduate course was about 60% overseas. There were plenty on DDs Engineering course and indeed she was the only Brit (and the only UG and the only medic) in the project group for her main piece of coursework. Their school had offered boarding so they were used to overseas students, and did not find it a problem, probably even an advantage. Our DC will be working in an increasingly international world and mixing with and working with international students will give them a head start.

London Universities have always been like this. I was the only Brit on my course at the LSE, way back in the dark ages. Staff are from all over as well and all DDs lectures/professors were from outside the UK.

FWIW the belief at DDs school was that it was easier for home students to get a place at Imperial than it was for classmates who qualified as international students.

The Times ran a front page story on this yesterday. Not necessarily the finest hour for journalistic standards. A lot of percentages but no absolute numbers’ context being one example.

full article behind the paywell. Pics from the hard copy paper, apologies for the abject quality.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/41033358-329a-11ee-b04c-88a034803f06?shareToken=9b730642097393c71e5badf02c6fd357

I was a foreign student in the uk and actually worried about getting in 😂 I and my fee money got accepted everywhere I sent an application. Not a very attractive degree though so there were only a handful of us in class.

@Camdenish really appreciate you posting that link to the online article.

what is interesting in looking at the numbers in the online article is that the Times have included both undergrads and postgrads to get to their overall numbers and conclusions.

Glasgow Uni is singled out. 137% increase in international students as compared with 31% for UK students. At the overall level this is quite correct. For all students, so both full time and part time, home students have increased by 6115 moving from 19480 in 214/15 to 25595, and internationals by 10,055 moving from 7335 to 17390. So the maths works.

Massive but coming.

most of Glasgows international growth is down to postgrads not undergrads.

international postgrads account for almost 90% of the international increase. 3675 in 2014/15 and 12680 in the most recent year’s figures. An increase of 9005.

at the undergrad level Glasgow has increased home undergrads by 3250 as compared with an increase of 1100 for internationals. Still a bigger increase in percentage terms for internationals, 32% vs 21% for UK undergrads, but of course due to the much lower starting point. Numerically 15500 home undergrads have increased to 18750 whilst 3600 international undergrads have increased to 4710.

So in many respects the data presented by the Times whilst usefully serving the narrative they want to promote is much more nuanced in reality.

That massive but could be applied to varying degrees to each one of the unis they list.

and no idea why they left out Queen’s Belfast. Possibly something to do with overall numbers having fallen by nearly 10% as compared with 14/15

Pleasure @boys3. The Times is my one treat!

I’m surprised ucl didn’t rank higher for oversea students.

@Poppyblush Ucl already had loads! The tables are changes in numbers since 2015. So they won’t be top for change. Still very sought after though, like Imperial, who aren’t on the table at all. Or LSE. They already took lots of overseas students too.

Highest proportion of international undergrads for any UK Uni, although only marginally higher percentage than LSE, which in turn is around four percentage points more than Imperial.

the elite London unis’ profile as need observed* *is quite different to anywhere else.

UCL has a much more even postgrad home and international split though, which is very different to many.LSE over 75% international at PG level.

The lack of language skills on my DS's UG stem course is what gets him down. Having to do group presentations and coursework with people who find it really hard to manage basic communication in English isn't ideal. He can't believe that they've passed the required language exams and suspects there's been some bribery involved, or people have sent in proxies to sit the exams for them. Not sure if he's being unfairly harsh, but he's quite used to mixing with people of different nationalities and always enjoyed it until starting this course. I think it's more than 50% foreign students on his course in a northern uni. DD's medicine cohort is also quite international, but a smaller percentage and much more successfully integrated - that would make sense if the internationals had to get through interviews like home students do (not sure if that's the case) as that would weed out the weaker English speakers. (Although you'd like to think language skills would improve massively in the first few months, that doesn't necessarily happen if there's not much integrating going on). It's a conundrum, that's for sure.

Most courses do not interview so poor language skills are not noticed. Obviously interviews are going to show it up.

Also a lot of variance between faculties and departments. Social and Historical Sciences have a much larger proportion of home and EU students compared to, like, Maths, Business, etc. What I do find interesting is the very large percentage of London students within the UK cohort at all the London RGs (which in turn caused issues with overshoot last year due to London A Level results being high).