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

There are some issues with too many unis offering minority subjects @Barbadossunset . It’s not that we don’t need music students but we don’t need an excess of them.

I do notice that many students in the USA stay at their home uni and get reduced fees. Great if you are near a good one, less good if you are not.

We have a bloated HE sector and we need to accept that not all unis should offer all subjects. We set up technology unis in the 60s. Now they offer a huge range of subjects? Why? We had polys that were closely allied to employers and providing great skills for work , but now they offer every subject. There is huge duplication and some rationalization is needed. I appreciate that’s difficult yet OB culled music. It’s possible.

TigerorFizz that makes complete sense. Why did the former Polys start offering such a huge range of subjects? Was it to attract more students or because there was government legislation saying there must be a good variety of subjects offered?

To attract more students - vocational courses offered by polys were great when the UK had a strong manufacturing industry and needed an abundance of those skills. We're now largely a service provider - with countries like China and India far cheaper to buy from.

So demand for HNDs in vocational areas fell, and polys became universities and developed non-vocational (although plenty of polytechnics offered degrees in History, Philosophy etc).

And don't forget the majority of graduate level jobs don't need a specific degree.

Also don't forget teaching and nursing weren't graduate occupations - they now are and that accounts for a lot of the expansion.

Thank you Titchy - that’s very interesting.

@mids2019 your post comes across as very ill-informed to say the least.

International students generally need to clear a higher bar to gain a place at Oxbridge. For example, an international student is likely to need 75+ in MAT (Maths Admission Test) to receive an invitation to interview in Oxford whereas home students need a much lower mark usually in the region of 55-60.

Universities do not include international students as part of their inclusivity and diversity targets.

A page earlier in the thread, we were talking about US universities as a comparator.

This is an interesting take on the US university situation from an NYU professor.

https://www.profgalloway.com/rot/

The Polys always did offer courses in management and other skills needed for service industries plus education courses. In the 60s and 70s it was clear manufacturing firms were not the only employers (certainly in Oxford!) and we had a much broader employment sector. I think the former polys and others have expanded into just about every subject area possible and over provision by all unis in some subjects should be considered as detrimental to the country and the students when they don’t get the jobs they want.

Nurses always get jobs. Once a profession must have a degree, it tends to mop up all grads if it has a shortage of staff. If you look at traditional subjects the lower league unis don’t look so great in terms of employment and some of the students are not competitive in the jobs market.

The polys had many lecturers with direct recent experience of work in the fields they taught. As indeed did the colleges of HE. I can understand why polys became unis as they already offered degrees but colleges of HE offered few and they should have remained as colleges offering HE but not necessarily degrees.

The part time students also got a good deal at polys. A HNC student got as many hours teaching in a day a week as most students studying similar subjects get in a whole werk. Plus we all went to work. It was tough to do well because we certainly had a schedule of assignments too. Employers will take on grads to do jobs but it’s doubtful they are better at their jobs than the recruits without degrees who could study part time in subjects closer to the needs of the employer for three years before the grad even gets a job. It would be a more targeted approach which I think would be beneficial but we need high calibre grads too.

Very poor reporting to quote foundation vs standard application!! It's not comparable

@Butterfly44 Isn’t it The Telegraph? Other motives at play.

@Butterfly44 as I posted above I’m in uni guidance in an international school and we are seeing much the same thing for standard applications - much lower offer requirements for international fee paying students. But we are EU based and small numbers compared to China, ME, India so not so much attention. But it’s definitely going on.

also, I understand that once the foundation year is done the international fee payers get funnelled straight into the first year course? They don’t have to demonstrate that in that year they’ve moved to the same academic standard that a local ‘home fees’ student would need to have to get in.

Depending on which university. Trinity Maths in Cambridge has a very high bar for international students. Applicants who are not in the national IMO team might even not be shortlisted for an interview.

Polys and even local colleges did professional courses back in the day - they weren't just for vocational and manual skills.

I did my second level accountancy by evening classes at a local Poly and did my finals at a college of FE in a town about an hour away on day release. A few years after qualifying, I started teaching adults basic accounting at our local college of FE by evening classes.

When polys converted to Unis, (and colleges of FE converted to 16-18 year old only) all that stopped. In the firm where I worked, we really struggled to find places where our trainees could be taught accountancy qualifications as all the local places, (colleges of FE and converted Polys) had stopped doing it. The only route became full time degrees at our local Uni which was useless for our trainees who were working!

Nowadays, not so much of a problem with the advent on online professional training courses, but it was a massive problem in the late 90s and 00s.

We've really screwed up our training and education systems for those who don't want or can't do a Uni degree. Polys and Adult Colleges offered a brilliant range of courses, full and part time, day release, for all kinds of vocation, profession and even hobbies, but it's all gone!

We've really screwed up our training and education systems for those who don't want or can't do a Uni degree.

Yes. I begged my two dc not to go to university as neither were interested in academic work. However they wanted to do what their friends were doing and their argument to which I had no answer was ‘so many jobs nowadays will only consider applicants with degrees’.

@EmpressoftheMundane
Funny enough, I know one of the people who contributed to the comments section of the 'Rot' blog piece. As an aside, it's interesting to see the poor grammar and writing of a few of the law school grads who left comments.

In general, the comments section reveals the privilege of white grads of a certain era in American history - many people who seem to have fallen into jobs and advanced because they had several advantages to begin with in an age of little or no competition.

India and China were not sending students abroad back in the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s to any great extent. The collapse of American manufacturing industry and its ramifications hadn't come about until the 80s. There were viable alternatives to university education. Blue collar jobs paid a living wage, and weren't restricted to trades with lengthy apprenticeships and off-putting hurdles to getting in and staying in like racism and misogyny, as they are today. It is very hard for women and poc to become union plumbers or electricians or carpenters. A large proportion of high school grads now view university as a necessity, and application numbers have risen accordingly.

A huge number of kids get to attend university affordably via ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) or transferring from two-year community college associates degrees into a university for the last two years of a bachelor's degree, something that doesn't figure much in the general comparison between the US and UK, but maybe it should.

Yes, that blogger has described a general problem in elite higher education very succinctly (and the general rising costs across all institutions is touched upon in the comments). I suspect some of his pov stems from a comparison of his academic salary with thst of some pen pusher in the administration, but heyho...his overall point is valid. His answer to the problem would work too, imo. But the political will to make a dent in the debt issue isn't there. Forces on either side of the debate ('know nothing' style populism on one hand and people invested in elitism on the other) mean it's unlikely to be resolved in any way other than lawsuits or demographic forces or geopolitical trends or market forces, as opposed to political intervention. Running the flag of debt elimination up the flag pole serves a political purpose as a vote getter more than anything else.

Maybe the experience of Ireland is something the UK could note? Decisions made in the 60s and 70s have resulted in raising the usual school leaving age and opened access to technical training and third level education via what used to be the Regional Technical Colleges, now called Institutes of Technology/ Technological Universities. They originally offered certificates but now offer certificates and also degrees up to level 10.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Technology,_Carlow
A snapshot of a specific original Regional Technical College.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutes_of_technology_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Creation
The original and development of the current IT/ UT network.

Their scope was never intended to be limited to purely vocational course offerings. The content of courses has adapted to changes in business, industry, agriculture, technology, and the wider economy.

That's not correct @rickyrickygrimes. This article addresses some of the inaccuracies in the article: www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/latest/insights-and-analysis/are-universities-letting-international

@Kazzyhoward Exactly! I’m not sure why people think polys were just about manufacturing and industry.