As an English teacher and sixth form tutor, I spend a lot of my time at the moment celebrating and comforting students as they hear about their UCAS offers. I try to reassure them when they are disappointed – which many of them were last week in particular, when Cambridge offers came out – that the system is flawed and far from always fair. Many of them this weekend will have realised just how unfair it can be, as a Sunday Times investigation revealed that British universities are paying tens of millions of pounds a year to recruit lucrative overseas students with far lower grades than those required of UK applicants.
Up to 15 Russell Group universities now offer special one-year foundation courses for international students with ludicrously low entry requirements: for example, if an overseas student wished to study an economics foundation pathway at Durham, they would need CCD grades; if one of my students wanted to study economics at Durham, they would need A*AA. This is not a case of comparing apples and oranges either; the vast majority of international students who study on one of these foundation programmes go straight onto the undergraduate programme, with end-of-year exams described as little more than a ‘formality’.
Economics is a highly competitive course: Durham receives 34,000 applications for just 4,700 places, and yet younger international students can earn a place with only 5 GCSEs and no A-levels, whereas one of my students can have 11 level 9s and 3 As and still get rejected.
Of course, this is shocking, and people (myself and my students included) have a right to be outraged. It devalues higher education, something we should be very proud of (the UK has the second-most Nobel laureates of any nation and four of the world’s top 20 universities). It also undermines claims that universities should be recruiting the best and brightest, regardless of background: universities spend hundreds of millions of pounds on widening access and supporting disadvantaged students, yet the number of places for domestic students at Oxbridge and other top universities has fallen since 2015. Yet the outcome of the investigation is hardly surprising: universities’ over-reliance on international students is an open secret. Just last month a leaked memo from the University of York revealed that they were giving places to international students with BBC grades at A-level for AAA courses. Universities have become less about academic prestige and more about being competitive in a global market.
However, it is also all too easy to cry that ‘universities sell immigration, not education’ without considering the impossible financial position that universities are in. Inflation means that domestic tuition fees are only worth about £6,000 in today’s money, and the amount the government directly spends on higher education teaching has fallen in real terms by about four-fifths since 2010 (Germany’s government currently spends over double on each student that we do). This means that universities face an average shortfall of approximately £2,500 on every home undergraduate student they teach each academic year, which helps to explain why over 80 universities currently report annual deficits. Brexit has also cut off access to EU funding schemes that were previously worth an average of £800 million a year, and many universities will also be hit by the increase in employers’ contributions to pensions from April.
The system needs radical reform, but, much like the behemoth of the NHS, no one seems willing to start this difficult conversation. Given the current economic climate, the idea of giving more money to universities, either from taxes or raising tuition fees, is hardly an obvious vote-winner. Neither party seems to have any idea how to bring about institutional change or how to fix the funding model: Keir Starmer has already backtracked on a longstanding Labour promise to abolish tuition fees entirely, and has instead made vague noises about a ‘fairer’ tuition fee system; meanwhile, the Conservatives have made small reforms to student loans repayments but ultimately calculations suggest that half of these are still picked up by the taxpayer. We therefore have this strange paradox in which the government wants economic growth after years of sluggish productivity, but doesn’t know how to invest in and prioritise the very sector which will lead to new ideas, innovation and technologies.
In the absence of any real alternative, international students and the premium they pay are therefore the best way for universities to balance the books. Many idealists (like myself) will wistfully say that universities should be hubs of learning, but the reality is they have been told to act like businesses, and therefore we must not be surprised when they do so. My students may rightly say that this isn’t fair, but I suppose that is an important lesson in itself.
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