Standards of learning have suffered as administrators increasingly focus on raising revenue from foreign students, writes Joanna Williams for the Times. Here’s an extract:
Our cash-strapped higher education sector has increased the number of foreign students by 50 per cent in five years. One in every four students is from overseas. In one sense this focus on international students is understandable: they pay up to three times as much as their UK peers for the same educational experience. But it has fundamentally transformed higher education. When elite institutions recruit from abroad, they make it harder for British youngsters to secure a place. The average entry requirement from a Russell Group university is now at least three A grades at A-level. Meanwhile, universities that have struggled to recruit from abroad are resorting to mergers, cutting courses and making teaching staff redundant. The biggest losers are students.
For instance, higher numbers of international students also point to a lowering of academic standards. As this paper revealed, overseas students are being recruited on to courses at top universities with far lower entry qualifications than their British peers. They can’t all make the leap. Instead, teaching is dumbed down and lower standards are disguised with grade inflation.
Academic freedom is another concern. The experience of FSU member Professor Michelle Shipworth is telling. After she used slavery in China as an example in a lecture, Chinese students complained and UCL terminated the module she had taught for several years. (More than 11,000 students at UCL are from China.) Arif Ahmed, the new free-speech tsar for English universities, has warned against restricting academic freedom in order to avoid upsetting international students or the sensitivities of foreign governments.
None of this is the fault of international students and we must not blame them for Britain’s broken higher education sector. Universities sold customer satisfaction to students long before they looked to recruit abroad. Neither was it foreign regimes that determined student satisfaction should mean freedom from offence rather than freedom of speech.
Over the past decade, students have morphed from consumers into being an inconvenience to those running universities. Teaching detracts from the more profitable business of overseas recruitment and writing research grant applications. The international revolution has only exacerbated existing problems.
Worth reading in full.
