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

If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll get the results you've always got.

In the case of university funding, you'll get universities closing down, or the development of an even more obvious hierarchy among UK universities than there already is, with only a few attracting top applicants for both undergrad and postgrad places and able to offer the kind of financial incentives the better off universities in the Anglophone world do.

@mathanxiety so what's your suggestion?

@londonmummy1966 where are you getting your information from? It sounds like a load of racist guff derived from many years of reading the Daily Mail and listening to the likes of Katie Hopkins, but I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that it must be more than anecdotal evidence based on what your child and your lecturer mate have said.

They don’t give grants to universities

Yes they do. When students paid much lower fees, and no fees, the OfS (then HEFCE) grant was much higher. Once £9k fees came in classroom based course grant dropped to nothing, and higher cost courses to a little bit above nothing.

@Needmoresleep Happily the US Dept of Education had opened an investigation into the use of legacy admissions at Harvard (July 2023). Findings are expected to have wide ranging consequences.

Yes...

Including an expected drop in donations.

She said where her information was from - her child's class. She want claiming it was the stat for the whole cohort

@Revengeofthepangolins I was referring to comments like this:

"Those home students who do get in are then being screwed over by international students not up to the course who CBA to improve their English still asking the same basic questions at the end of year 3 that they were asking at the beginning of year 1 as they CBA to make an effort."

I used to donate to the LSE regularly, till I wrote saying that DS was really enjoying his time there, and they replied saying I was no longer eligible and took me off their mailing list. As if my small donations would have been able to buy any influence. One day I might even ask to get the begging letters again.

Part of the reason why I did is that they work quite hard to keep Graduates on board. When I was working overseas, being able to join local LSE graduates group was a good way of getting to know both locals and expats and generally less stuffy than the Oxford and Cambridge lot. And now I can I attend some interesting public lectures (back in the day when they were in person only I sometimes had access to priority booking), and the occasional social event (in the past they have run a good election night special), but also use of the library, and a central London alumni centre. I have yet to visit the latter, but may turn up to an upcoming open day which involves talks, afternoon tea and more. They also run various professional networking groups (lawyers, publishing etc) and a once in a decade or so, reunion weekend for graduates from my year group, which was surprisingly enjoyable and which people came a long way to attend.

DS, who followed me to LSE, has also benefitted. He is completing a PhD elsewhere, but as well as using the library seems to have been able to wangle some office space (possibly unofficially) when he is in London, which in turn has enabled him to keep up with his University contacts in an organic way, ie by bumping into them in corridors.

In short, I don't think it is about culture, or about nostalgia but more what you get out of retaining/renewing contact.

It’s difficult to know if we really need all this training for musicians. There’s an over supply of places so of course they fill up with international students. Thats not to say I don’t value music but we never question why these degrees and consevatoires exist in such large numbers.

@BlindurErBóklausMaður

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.

Then explain:
1)The government used to set very strict quotas on the number of international students a university could recruit. When they dropped this, the number of international students at unis. (See image attached) The government capped what universities could charge local students. The universities had to fund alternative sources of revenue.

The university facilities have not grown in line with increase of international students. There is a limit to how many students overall can attend. If the international student numbers have increased by this many, explain how this does not affect the number of home students able to be admitted?

2. every year in clearing, universities will openly display available spaces open to international^ students only^ and display grades requirements which are significantly lower than the standard requirement.

This is not hidden. It is open to see every year during clearing on the university websites.

This is an entirely different conversation. You are questioning the validity of a music course 🙄

This may have been over scrupulous on the part of LSE but it is a nice contrast to the culture of legacy admissions in America.

Being admitted to the same uni as your parents on merit is fine and I don’t think the DoE is objecting to that. But many US universities including Harvard have ‘different’ admissions standards for legacies. That’s the issue and it is indeed tied to cultivating donations. Not for nothing are legacy admissions programmes called ‘affirmative action for the rich’.

The government didn't set caps on international students. It gave universities a cap on the number of UK and EU students they could recruit with particular grades. Those caps don't currently exist, but they could be reintroduced.

UK universities have separate targets for UK and international students and in most cases have separate recruitment teams dealing with them. Trust me when I say that no university wants to rely heavily on international students, because if the government clamps down more on immigration, that could leave them high and dry.

I've never read the Mail and have no idea who Katy Hopkins is - I do have a number of uni lecturer friends and most of them send a lot of time complaining about the poor levels of English that some of their international students arrive with - note not all of my friends and not all of their students. However from what they have said it is not unreasonable of me to infer that there is a reasonable cohort of international students at a number of institutions in Scotland and England that turn up "barely able to string a phrase together" as one friend described it. Furthermore, DC is forever complaining about wasting time in rehearsals and coachings as fellow students don't understand basic English. So either the English language qualifications asked for aren't fit for purpose or the arrangements around ID of candidates sitting them are not sufficiently robust. DC strongly suspects the latter..... I'm sorry that this anecdata does not tie in with the narrative you seem keen to push on this thread.

Shall we agree that your comments on my being racist are best considered unsaid?

@londonmummy1966 so you have decided on the basis of what a few of your friends have said (and your DC's 'strong suspicions') that "Those home students who do get in are then being screwed over by international students not up to the course who CBA to improve their English still asking the same basic questions at the end of year 3 that they were asking at the beginning of year 1 as they CBA to make an effort."

That to me smacks of someone who has formed a particular view of a whole group of people based on very little.

If I'm trying to push any 'agenda' it's simply that universities need cash, and international students are not coming over en masse to steal your children's futures...

I have friends who are academics at 14 different institutions across a range of subjects and they all say this - it drives them up the wall.

Explain if you will why during clearing, universities post available courses only^ open to international students and with requirements several^ grades below standard.

Don't believe me? Go look this year. It happens every year. It's no secret. It's right there on their websites during clearing.

Re: "Trust me when I say that no university wants to rely heavily on international students, because if the government clamps down more on immigration, that could leave them high and dry"
Of course some of them don't want to. But they do anyway. Some out of financial necessity, some out of greed.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/may/18/english-universities-warned-not-to-over-rely-on-fees-of-students-from-china

Re: "The university facilities have not grown in line with increase of international students. There is a limit to how many students overall can attend."
As an example, on my DC's course the size of a year group is physically constrained by the size of lecture theatres . Around 60% of places are given to overseas students from China alone; 4% to other overseas students, leaving 36% of the places for home students. For the department overall the overseas undergrads boost the department's finances by around 15 million per year.
If only 36% of the seats in the lecture theatre in a top-tier uni are filled by home students the inevitable result is that other home students are pushed down to lower tier institutions. Anyone who thinks different has been blinded by political correctness into denial of reality.

I am fairly comfortable with large-ish numbers of foreign students coming to the UK but I think it'd be prudent and in the national interest to reserve say 70% of places on each course for home students and allow no more than 15% of each course to be filled by any one other country, perhaps less if that country has been designated a threat by our security services.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/china-rishi-sunak-prime-minister-iain-duncan-smith-government-b2408737.html

@flusterbluff I expect many will have already met their target for UK students.

thepienews.com/news/ucas-results-2023/#:~:text=Some%2079%25%20of%20UK%20school,A%2Dlevel%20results%20are%20released

I don't see evidence of greed being a motivator in that article @piisnot3.

Ultimately if a cap on international students like the one you suggest were introduced, then the government would have to allow universities to charge significantly higher fees to UK students. Otherwise the sums won't add up.

But why the massive drop in required grades? We are talking about 3 or more grade drops. AAB dropped to CCC type drops. Much lower than the single grade or occasional 2 grade drop offered to UK students in clearing.

Have you seen significant differences in the grades required for the same course at the same university for UK vs international students @flusterbluff? If so that would be a more difficult decision to defend (and I wouldn't). Historically it was the case that caps existed for UK students with less than AAB, which would have explained what you're saying. But those don't exist now AFAIK.

Yes exactly this. Look online during this year's clearing.
Either highly sought after Uni's with nothing in clearing except offers for international students at a much lower grade requirement or less sought after unis who at the end of clearing where they have received all the home student applications they are likely to receive change their offering to international students only again with a much much lower grade requirement.