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

... that wasn't a uni closing though. Or was it somewhere else?

Over here we just teach CAE or IELTS and I already had a group in her year doing CAE so she just joined them. She was very disgruntled as a native speaker at having to do it at all, till I pointed out that all kids resident in the UK need an English language qualification to go to university.

Yes midwifery at cccu. I know it wasn’t a uni closing but my point is if students from a single course can’t be absorbed/picked up by another uni the chance of a whole university’s students getting places elsewhere is remote I’d have thought? And it also demonstrates that you can’t just transfer over seamlessly even when there are spaces, modules don’t always align etc.

@StrawberryJellyBelly no one is saying all international students are sub par - the point is that there are recruiting international students who don't meet the normal academic requirements so accept with either lower grades (than home students) on to Foundation years or this new International Foundation. Of course there are plenty of international students who have equally good academic records as home students that go straight into Year One.
@lastdayatschool I worked in publishing and I think the issue is cutting back on good subeditors - they polish the copy to make it make sense as well as check facts.
@TizerorFizz you make a dangerous point there - I can just imagine the uproar and accusations of further elitism if the Government allows universities to charge more in line with the quality (outcomes?) of their degrees! And then you'd have to charge differently for each course within the university - a minefield! In the US you do pay vastly different fees, not always according to the quality or graduate successes though.

CCCU was because they failed their accreditation. Awful for the students, but Surrey took them all (keeping them Kent based). The reason they had to start their final year from scratch was because the course wasn't up to NMC standards.

@mondaytosunday It’s already been mooted! Plus fees were supposed to be a range when they last increased. It was never envisaged fees would be the same for all courses.

Why uproar? It shows a huge misunderstanding of fees/loans given by the state that 50% never pay off! By taking a loan and not working at much, the very rich can get a degree for nothing.

As I said, the idea of differential fees is not new and why should a uni course with constantly poor outcomes for students charge the same as Oxford? Why should students with 6 hours a week tuition subsidise the medics and engineers who take up vastly more in resources and are mostly going to get grad employment and a lifetime of higher earnings? It’s elite to charge a high fee for the courses poorer people choose. And we know where too many of them are. We rob poorer students to subsidise those who will always be better off.

Especially with the amount of handholding UK universities seem to do for their students.

No handholding where DD went to university. The tutors and lecturers were very hands off. It was very much up to the students to be show initiative and be self motivated. It was nothing like school (STEM degree, Newcastle).

As I said, the idea of differential fees is not new and why should a uni course with constantly poor outcomes for students charge the same as Oxford?

In theory that's kind of how it works now. Any provider without an APP or TEF can't charge more than £6k ish.

The loan system was never designed to yield a 100% RAB btw - 65% is what it was predicated on originally, and what the new Plan 5 loans should yield.

My School’s ethos is consistent with the experience of @RampantIvy ’s DD. We have a good amount of support available, particularly for students with special needs, but they must jump through hoops to access it. However post-pandemic the entire student body is less robust.

It is a lot of support compared to Continental universities, however

There is another option, but the vast majority of British universities are very late to the table here.

The vast majority of American universities, even third or fourth rate institutions, have vast endowments, and professional staff employed full time or in fundraising, with funds professionally managed.

www.varsity.co.uk/features/4155
Harvard has an endowment of $32 billion. Cambridge, which leads UK universities in endowment size, boasts £4 billion.

It is utterly preposterous in this day and age (and has been for decades) for universities to rely on student fees for their financing.

The US is pretty much the only place in the world where endowments finance universities! And fees are still way higher than anywhere else.

The vast majority of the West funds HE from taxation. That's the ideal (and what we had) not to go to the other extreme.

@titchy But when the uni sector expanded it wax too expensive. I looked into this recently for my discussion group. We wanted more dc to go to uni but the care assistant and millions of others on lower wages didn’t want to continue paying for others to get what they hadn’t got and a lifetime of higher wages. The degree premium was around 17% then.

It came to a head with the 1992 act creating the new unis. Until then government spending on unis had halved in 20 years in real terms. Who could keep asking the worse off working class to keep paying for the new unis and the better off middle class to get even more out of society? It turned out to be neither Labour or the Conservatives. In 1970, 9% of 18 year olds went to uni. Now it’s 40%. Quite simply the taxpayers funding all of it wasn’t tenable so all parties go with fees and loans. The money isn’t there for direct state payments. Also loans have been popular judging by numbers going to uni.

Also we had just 18 unis in 1950. That just seems impossible to comprehend now.

@mathanxiety How many students do the top USA unis educate each year? Oxford take around 3500? How many at the world class USA ones? Plus the Brits don’t give. USA citizens do and like to be seen doing so. The low paid give a higher percentage of earnings away than the rich here and most of those people haven’t been near uni! Obviously some super rich give to unis but many don’t or won’t.

Organisations are increasingly seeking graduates with a global outlook who can work well in multinational and multi-cultural teams. A major swing towards increasingly hiring international students for graduate schemes is hardly surprising.

Shame on your School for making students with special needs jump through hoops.

It's going to happen now and again but I couldn't work at a place where this was the norm.

It's not ideal where I am, far from it, but most understand that in order to address accessibility issues, the accessibility has to be, well, accessible.

As for post-pandemic, the entire student body is less robust for good reason.

Not sure the point of this post @Tohoku ?

I cannot change policy, my voice has not gone unheard. We are better than many. Probably better than most.

I think we all agree the post pandemic reasons are good. No implication otherwise. Outside the storied (and monied) halls of Oxbridge however we can only do what we can do.

It is not just the uni places but the accommodation also, DDs uni city like others has a big shortage of student accommodation. DD was recently looking for a second year house and lost out on several because an international student had offered to pay the whole house rent a year in advance which of course landlords would prefer. How can students here afford to compete with this?

The students then look for work here after getting their degree - could mean we have lots of second rate graduates working in the UK rather than the brightest and best which the Gov claims we need.

International students usually have to pay the full year accommodation up front. That's a landlord thing, not an international student thing. It's because most landlords offering student accommodation won't accept a non UK based guarantor.

There are restrictions- the post study work visa is only for 2 years.

Also are you suggesting that employers would lower their standards and prioritise a 'weaker' international student over a stronger British student? Why would they do that?

The supposed relative poverty of oxbridge has been overstated somewhat above. Endowment figures quoted for the university tend to exclude the wealth of the colleges which more than doubles the total endowment.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/may/28/oxford-and-cambridge-university-colleges-hold-21bn-in-riches
Oxbridge is comparably wealthy to the elite US institutions, but the rest of UK unis are not.
Forbes published figures showing the median endowment of a group of >600 US colleges to be around $200 million. Not dissimilar to many of the larger UK unis.
The US benefitted from generally favourable economic circumstances for most of the last 200 years, and insulation from the effects of 2 world wars. Extremely wealthy individuals such as Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt established and endowed universities as their legacy. Compound interest over several decades did the rest. The nearest equivalent wealth in the UK was held and retained mainly by the aristocracy, whose engrained culture is to take, not give.

Student fees were introduced as a way of "personalising" the cost and keeping it off the national balance sheet. The same kind of trick as PFI initiatives, which were also to enable continued spending without it showing as part of the national debt. Essentially cooking the books. Ultimately a sham, and the price society pays in the long term is higher. The fact that most European countries fund their unis through general taxation and fees stay around £2k shows there are other ways.

When successive governments cut uni funding but also capped the fees that could be charged to home students, this left overseas students as the only available source of funding by which the unis could cover costs. This made corruption only a matter of time. As a nation we turn some of our best and brightest students away from our elite institutions in order to train foreign students, many of whom originate in countries hostile to the UK. We have even been doing their research for them. Some UK unis have compromised their integrity and the national interest. They could claim economic necessity drove them to it. Adequate government funding would have ensured this was not an excuse.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/11/imperial-college-to-shut-joint-research-ventures-with-chinese-defence-firms
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/secrets-power-china-in-the-uk-dispatches

As a nation we turn some of our best and brightest students away from our elite institutions in order to train foreign students, many of whom originate in countries hostile to the UK.

That myth has been debunked time and again. There are two completely different allocations. No Johnny Foreigner is stealing Billy Britain's place.

@piisnot3 The Government underwrites the loans! The fact is that when loans are not paid off, the government (us in the widest sense) pick up the tab. Without loans the HE sector would not have expanded and those that benefit most pay the “grad tax”. In future there are many degrees that are not worth the 40 year loan period. Prospective students need far better advice on how loans work and definitely careers and the grad tax system.

Whole system is a total mess and corrupt AF.

The emotive "corrupt dodgy international vs poor talented Brits" is a complete red herring

(Useful dog whistle for racism).

Universities became big businesses and the people making money are the people at the top or middlemen.

Lots of third parties creaming money off dodgy contracts to profit from students, international and otherwise.

For example, overpriced accommodation where students have to buy rugs and furnishings off the provider.

Or catering - no reasonably priced meals or drinks now apart from Starbucks or Costa.

Professors desperate to get cheap labour preferring international PhD students so they can give them the worst possible working conditions and hold their visas over them.

Sadly all this labour isn't even directed at anything worthwhile or innovative - just "produce more of Z metric so we can pretend we're successful".

Academic publishing companies do deals so that Universities (funded by the taxpayer and student fees) are both paying to publish with them, and being ranked on how many publications they produce.

Elsevier (one of the biggest scientific publishing companies) is more profitable than porn.

Essentially the taxpayer is being massively conned into funding "research" based on certain criteria, and very little of these funds actually goes on anything worthwhile. Most of it is creamed off somewhere.

The overspecialisation of science means that a lot of research is total BS, but its sufficiently opaque so they can (kind of) get away with it.

Senior academics sit on various "boards" of equipment companies to reappropriate these funds and direct/threaten junior academics to use an outdated piece of equipment that delivers ££££££ for the makers.

I'd add...the people determined to keep this system going definitely aren't the 19 year old students. They're not setting up these universities and courses!

There are people who are profiting off both the taxpayer, AND the fee-paying parents hoping education is the route to a better career and life!

They're the ones who should be scrutinised.

But of course, the media are bullies and cowards and will turn this into a sneery "Micky Mouse universities" debate.

Its easier to "punch down" at students and non-white people than highlight the pompous old Chancellors directing the unethical and aggressive student recruitment strategies

(who will be in the same social circles as media editors and journalists).