RG Selling Places for International Students with Low Grades

[Bratnews]

Published this evening in The Times. Hope this share token works :

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/c19d0459-e4dd-4380-98b1-1765db01aac2?shareToken=420162fcf72c4322d1c9a1588a180492

Unfortunatly this doesnt surprise me. I feel sorry for these international students. I lecture in a Russel group and these students just end up failing or come out with a very low grade. It's really unfair on these students and of course the national students who miss out on the place.

I'm getting increasingly pissed off with uni management and what there doing to our students.

My dh isn't British and for several years now I have watched as family and friends, from his home country, who I know aren't as intelligent as my dcs and who haven't had the benefit of a British education, get into unis my dcs could only dream of. Most recently we have had the son of a family friend receive an unconditional (!) offer for Surrey. His spoken English is dreadful. I can't imagine what his written English is like.
Ds1 didn't go a RG uni but his vocational course has one of the top rated in the country in the last few years. He said there were some international students on his course who couldn't compose a sentence during seminars or tutorials but would get 2:1s on their coursework. He wondered if they were either getting someone to do the coursework or the universities were marking them more favourably. Either way, their grades were suggesting a far greater competency to do the job than they actually possessed.
We are devaluing our university system.

They're not taking the place of national students though don't forget.

I agree it's not great treating these students as cash cows - but unis really have no choice. Their fees are keeping unis afloat - the sector is in dire straits financially.

Don't worry though - the current Gov is doing all it can to deter overseas students, which will mean unis will close and there'll be less places for home students....

The article calls out a fall in uk admissions, higher rejection rates for uk candidates. Poorer teaching as they are teaching to the student body not the uk students with A stars and As. Lecturers need to deliver at a slower pace.

Don't forget the grades quoted for international students are for foundation year entry, so not like for like. QM will take home students on way lower than AAA to a foundation year.

I disagree standards of degree are lower because lecturers teach to the class rather than the curriculum - marking schemes are pretty robust, there's no evidence that international students mean that the standard to achieve a 1st or 2:1 are being dragged down.

This has been happening for years. Universities need £££. Especially with the amount of handholding UK universities seem to do for their students.
The international fee for RG humanities is around 20K.

@JSMill You're completely right in that degrees are devalued. But what is a 'prestigious' university anyway. Surrey isn't RG and even within the 'RG' ( a self-defined group) there's a clear hierarchy. Universities with multiple Nobel Prize (and other pure academic award) winners like Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, LSE , Edinburgh aren't in the same category as, say, York. This isn't to look down on the universities just a statement of, well, 'prestige' and perception of standards.

I did my degree here at LSE , on scholarship from my home country graduated 5-6 years ago. Many from my home country were rejected but managed to get in other RG. These people were rich kids with very little academic ability but they wanted the so-called 'RG' prestige.

Even employers in our home country knew the value of their degree though. Competitive courses like Computer Science and Economics are still hard to get in so these people tended to go for something easier.

The sad fact is these incapable students are funding the unis. Without them there'd be fewer places. Also UK universities tend to do so much handholding, students are babied to succeed. In European universities you have to be more motivated, even exam slots are not guaranteed unless you sign up on time. Students aren't customers but there to learn, more people go to university but not everyone graduates, unlike in the UK where most do.

We can't have both. But at the same time HE should be better funded. Why all technical colleges etc became 'universities; I don't know. Leaving the EU a lot of research funding will be lost as well as EU students, the shortfall will have to be made up.

The article is quite misleading in that it compares entry levels for foundation year programmes with direct entry for year one students without making it clear (enough) that students entering with the lower grades are going on to do an additional year of study before joining the degree.

It also suggests that it's all underhand and that universities are sneaking students in through the back door to make a profit. In reality none of it is secret, and the fact is that without international fees, universities would go bankrupt. Many are already on the verge. The government withdrew funding for HE and set out to make it a competitive market whilst also setting restrictions on what fees could be charged to UK students, such that now they barely cover the cost of teaching them.

The article claims there are 15 Russell Group universities that offer special one-year pathway courses. The univerities are:
Durham, Bristol, Exeter, Warwick, Nottingham, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, Cardiff, Sheffield, Birmingham, Southampton, Queen Mary University of London and Queen’s University Belfast.

All of these universities are in dire need of the fees paid by international students. The only way these universities can attract sufficient numbers of international students are by offering lower grade requirements to these students.

@lsealumni The Conservatine Governmtnt created unis in 1992. They were not just technical colleges. They were all the polytechnics and were quickly followed by teacher training colleges and colleges of Higher Education. We already had technology universities established in the 60s, eg Aston and Brunel. The Polys used to offer more than just degrees. Our issue is that we have far too many doing full time degrees and nowhere near enough getting work and HE qualifications. The Conservative government lifted the cap on student numbers in 2014 and has since frozen fees. Mainly due to public and student pressure. So you reap what you sow.

The sector is bloated. By the way, my DD spent time at uni in Italy. Exams numerous times each year and you keep going until you pass. This can exceed 3 years by a long way!

Not all home students should be going to uni in the way they do. We need to build up our alternatives and accept some degrees cost too much for the value they offer. Also the state pays for the student loans that are not repaid. Therefore art students cost the country a packet in non repayment of loans. So why do we not ensure we put money into courses of greatest value? A cull is needed.

This has been the norm for years. Why do you think university towns are groaning under the weight of foreign students? Why do you think student accomodation is springing up everywhere?

Because in order to make the books balance, universities have to attract large numbers of high-fee paying students. The £9,250 that they receive for each UK student doesn't cover costs.

You have a choice, accept that overseas students will get in with lower grades than uk applicants, or pay £20k a year fees.

ds1 was talking about one overseas student he knows who is currently having his third attempt to do a first year course having failed twice (badly) before on different courses. It does seem to me that the university is thinking in terms of fee collection rather than the student's best interests.

Former RG STEM admissions tutor here. First it must be emphasised that PPs pointing out that the Times article is disingenuous at best and deliberately misleading at worst, in that the comparison is between Y1 entry for Home students and FY entry for Overseas students, are corrrect. This is shoddy journalism.

I cannot imagine any lecturer (at least in RG + STEM) marking Overseas students more leniently. But cultural clashes in the meaning of collaboration are a problem, and it is an open secret that most of us have too low an English requirement. No one is willing to be the first to increase it. Many students who have come in good faith are at a genuine disadvantage.

All of this in a setting where finances are dire and the mentality of students-as-customers prevails. Degree classifications have shot up. That’s one of our attractions for Overseas students.

I agree with @TizerorFizz that the sector is bloated, although I think this is true across the board. I don’t want to lose Arts subjects. I want to recalibrate our inflated degree classes (so that employers regard 2.2 as a strong achievement) and I too like the ‘Italian approach’ to exams, although I enjoy the more pastoral approach to HE taken here. I would love to keep a vibrant cohort of Overseas students, but not if they are coming here just because it is quick and (relatively) easy.

fwiw, may I add, my institution has a policy of blind marking. Not that you can even tell by a name if someone is international or domestic student, but we can't even guess at gender or ethnic origin, the script only has a number.

Fail the exams & fail to progress in the course, anyway.

@CleverKnot how does blind marking work for coursework submitted online? Genuine question. I'm a dinosaur and remember we'd only put our matric number on our papers. Everything my dcs do is submitted online so how are names hidden?
I am aware this question may make me sound stupid!!

@JSMill my 2 at different unis upload everything through portals which seems to anonymous the submissions. They don't email directly to lecturers or department office
Feedback and marks are returned through the portal.

Bit misleading at the beginning - foundation years, or access courses they are sometimes known as, are open to U.K. students with lower grades or unusual backgrounds too. I know several people who have taken this path very successfully

i don't know about the tech side of how it's hidden, but when we mark online, we see a number in the studentID field. We have so many to mark that we crack on with marking. Typically, many of the markers are not teaching on that module, so they are just assessing the answer according to pre-specified criteria, which is based on the information we are told students were taught & should know, and we often don't know the students individually even if we did see a name.

I gather that for people who are experts in the system and have access elsewhere in the system, there is some way to look up the number to match it to a name, but unless you personally know the student, you still may not be able to find the info at that point to know if they are domestic or international or anything else about them. All that info would be held somewhere else again in the digital records. We markers all seem to need a lot of instructions & handholding to access the digital scripts, we don't seem to have a lot of skills to ferret around in the rest of the digital system (and it changes every year...)

Marking takes ages if done as designed, that's a big incentive not to spend more time trying to find additional irrelevant info.

Our interviews for places are a bit like that too... The applicants may want to be personal yet it's literally my role to only assess their presentation and manner in the most superficial way. I forget most of them 30 seconds after they left the room.

I'm not sure if the Uni does blind recruitment for short-listing yet. It may come.

PhDs in science are also an issue I would add - supposedly the incoming overseas students have undergraduate degrees in their subject but experience shows that level of understanding is more similar to a level in some circumstances, quite alarming. Supervisors find themselves having to teach basics to get them vaguely up to speed and find a project they are capable of undertaking rather than the project originally planned. They still achieve but takes longer (more fees to the university ) and more stress for the supervisors

The £9k fees (for UK students) have been in place since 2012. It's simply not enough, especially after the last two years of high inflation. The government won't increase it as that would be unpopular with voters. So the only option for universities is to take on international students paying higher fees. Otherwise they will go bankrupt.

Having had a dc who recently finjshed at a RG uni it seems that lots of courses (not dcs..) had online exams or open book exams over a couple of days. This is open to abuse - by anyone (home or int'l) as you can't be sure who actually sat the exam. A recent online assessment dc did for a job was watched by an invigilator - and in a recent online interview they had to show ID. So it seems that people (at least in the workplace) are waking up to the fact that the people doing tests aren't always the people they should be.

@poetryandwine Im all for keeping some arts subjects but we have a bloated sector in many arts areas. I would never say not have it. Just reduce it. The tax payers are paying for these courses and many students don’t get enough money to pay back loans or get anywhere near it. I like art, theatre and music as much as anyone else but unemployment rates are high. Do we really need all those photography degrees? I’m not sure we do.

We need to ensure a first is a first too. 40% on some courses with lowish entry tariffs leads to employers not trusting what they read. Years ago 1% was normal. So getting back to sensible levels of firsts is needed too at some unis. Followed by 2:1 as well. The majority of degrees used to be 2:2 I think. That probably reflects society now such high numbers go to uni.

I thought the article did make a point that 'international foundation' led directly to Y2, not Y1 as normal Foundation, though maybe did not point out that difference distinctly enough. Regular Foundation years (leading to Year 1 of a degree) open to home students are lower entry, but not as low as those offered to international students according to that chart.
I also agree with @TizerorFizz - there seems to be a degree for everything. And there should definitely be some accountability about job prospects after earning that degree. My daughter decided against a creative course because after a lot of research thought career opportunities just did not exist in enough numbers, and she did not want to compromise on the work she would do (though I know @TizerorFizz would not really approve of the academic degree she is pursuing, but it does give broader employment opportunities).
What I'd like to see is an acknowledgment of the value and respect accorded to vocational courses. Trades are always in demand, but say you want to become an electrician or work in construction (neither to be replaced by AI any time soon), and it's seen as lesser than getting a 'proper degree'. My son has done a vocational course, and so many people say 'well he could a degree eventually'! Why would he need to if gainfully employed in what he trained in?
A joke I heard from Alexei Sayle on his 'Strangers on a Train' Radio 4 programme as he pulled in to Cambridge: 'where you need a PhD to work at Pret' hit close to home. When we went to an open day at Exeter University, we popped into a café. I asked the young woman serving us if she was a student. She responded she had graduated the previous year with a degree in Psychology. Ouch.

@mondaytosunday Most degrees have some value. What I’m not happy about is huge numbers doing degrees where jobs in those fields are scarce. If the tax payer is subsidizing a degree then surely the ones that don’t give their holders or the country any employment premium should be reviewed? Thats not the same as getting rid altogether.

I went to one of the RG universities named in the early 1990s and worked like a dog to get a 2:1. Most people got a 2:2 and a very small amount got firsts. About 65% 2:2s and lower. Had to get BCC and the same course now asks for a ABB and about 40% of students graduate with a first. Grade inflation has been rampant and seems to have been another method by which universities attract students ever since they've had to pay for it.

The lowest English language requirements for Surrey are:
GCSE Grade 4 for home students. @Bratnews

Cambridge CAE or equivalent for those not having gone through the UK system.

I teach the second, and my own daughter had to sit it (despite being a native speaker) to get into Bath as she didn't have a GCSE (educated in Italy)

I'd like to see Jimmy with his GCSE pass the reading, use of English and Writing parts of CAE.