The UK Gov funding of universities does not cover their operational costs. I am not sure how we silently got ourselves into this position but the fact is that without foreign students the universities will run out of money. It's strange to me as some of these universities have portfolios of property in the billions of pounds. I would have thought more industry collaboration and smarter use of property could generate income for the universities. Unfortunately there are many high tech well funded industries that get constant campaigns against them on campuses, mostly by students not even in a related field.
I'm not sure how you fix this. The UK is sleep walking into becoming irrelevant.
I think that's a bit of an oversimplification to be fair, pretty much all of our "traditional" universities are absolutely capable of standing on their feet without international students, I mean if you look at the assets of just (any given) college at cambridge; they're swimming in money. Trinity (used to?) own the 02 arena as a fairly minor part of their holdings for example.
The story is very different for "ex-polys" like Sheffield Hallam, or oxford brooks many of whom absolutely trade on the basis of foreign students essentially propping up the entire operation more or less.
From my direct experience, even the Russel group universities are in a dire financial situation. At least that's the top down message, again being positive in cash for many years and owning property to me would be a good position but I have first hand knowledge of Russel group universities cutting staff/roles/courses and going after the foreign students as much as they can.
Some of this is their own making - for example the 'highly respected' universities not doing clearing so when their intake is lower than expected they don't top that up with 2nd choices.
Schools are now competing within universities to win student retention so their numbers don't look as bad / to help protect their budgets from being slashed further.
> pretty much all of our "traditional" universities are absolutely capable of standing on their feet without international students
This is simply not true. At least not currently possible. If the UK made the _strategic decision_ then I don't see why we couldn't, but currently if all foreign students boycott'd the UK then the majority of our universities would be bankrupt. (Again, in the way they are currently managed: they could sell property etc. but that's never considered.)
I dont have the data, but Oxford Brookes is actually an exception and I don't think the only one. It's awash with money because of the sheer volume of domestic wealthy attendees with various donations to various causes. Sheffield Hallam and most of the other polys aren't usually in quite the same position and your point stands.
I've looked at the data for some of the Russell Group and, coming from a US perspective, I was rather shocked at how reliant even top UK universities are on tuition. Apart from Oxbridge, they mostly don't have anywhere near the cashflow from endowments or alumni donations as the US Ivy League does.
The state already paid for education to the age of 18. Another 3 years of specialized education costs (the state) more. Getting more kids into HE, costs more even when they fees that are still state subsidized. Hence the increase in unsubsidised foreign students.
It's debatable whether the desired outcome of better educated and 'more employable' 21 year olds was actually achieved, or whether it simply removed a large cohort from the unemployment figures.
I found the anti-banking and anti-military campaigns on campus to be fantastic sources of information that helped me understand more of the reality of the companies who were trying to hire me. It was incredibly biased and performative, but so is the other side of the conversation.
Indeed, all info is good as long as you check the intended/implicit bias if nothing else it's indicative of what they want you to think about something.
For me I draw the line at military systems (though given the type of programming I do not really relevant) and gambling systems (which actually has come up before and was a lot more money but I decided that me looking in the mirror and liking the person looking back mattered more) - I don't presume to judge other people for it though, it's my personal choice.
At least some of the problem is the level of costs which are spent on admin activities instead of teaching (research is supposed to be separately funded although in reality it's messy). That's where I'd start.
The admin staff are very much underpaid in comparison to academic staff, and it would be impossible for the academic staff to manage without the admin staff. Also, there is fairly little admin staff at the school level compared to academic staff. When you get to "central" staff, then yes it's pretty much 100% admin/directors/c-level/etc. staff and I don't know what they do that's not being done by the hard worked school staff.
> I would have thought more industry collaboration and smarter use of property could generate income for the universities.
It probably could but Universities as with all organisations are going to take the easy path and trading in on the prestige of UK universities for foreign students is easier and more profitable.
We’ve known that China has been doing this for years to UK universities.. Significant numbers of foreign students are Chinese and universities rely on foreign students for income.
Given the funding and wealth mentioned by other commenters, I think "rely" might not be the right word. More that they are 'accustomed' to getting all this foreign student money. And they like it.
The international student Harry Potter experience economy model is not actually working for British universities. If your idea of a university is: outputting high quality research and developing the next cohort of researchers/other talented people who go into industry, etc.
Another lesser problem is the half-baked REF system.
The range of institutions called universities in the UK is large and I think you are conflating properties of one end of the range with properties of the other.
I disagree. Oxbridge, LSE, Edinburgh, etc appear equally as susceptible. In fact in top London universities it seems to be worse - prestige attracts more international students.
I also agree in the sense that there are less prestigious universities that appear to operate as if they are almost Chinese/in China.
I don't need to divulge personal information to make a point. See comment below. I think it is pretty apparent to anyone with any interactions with universities in the U.K. and in other countries. The fact that it is now a geopolitical tool for China is pretty concerning.
Yeah it's just funny that its more akin to a sector in the tourism industry than academic or research. There are obviously pockets of world-class research and brilliant academics but the pressures in the opposite direction are pretty insane due to the business incentives.
Two HN posters telling each other “exaaaaactlyyyy”, and the premise is universities are same as tourism.
(full disclosure: I dropped out of state school with a 2.8 GPA in economics and got a job at Google 5 years later. yet, I can avoid this fallacy, so it's disturbing to see)
The point about the tourism/finishing school aspect of universities in Britain is widely held and has been reported on for years. It was inevitable that it would provide China with leverage and other things. Not a good idea imo.
We also went on a bit of a walk back from the bailey to the motte. "sector in the tourism industry" to "tourism/finishing schoolaspect" (tourism ~= finishing school now?).
Then, a vague hand wave towards "wide reporting" for...the original idea that universities are tourism? Or one of the new ones, like universities have an aspect of finishing school? Unclear.
- U.K. universities have pivoted to being a finishing school (e.g. you cannot fail if you pay enough money) and Harry Potter experience for international students.
-This affects all levels of prestige. Harms research.
- Is a geopolitical leverage tool of unknown power. Interesting example linked by poster.
Much has been said about China’s influence on Western universities, yet Qatar’s footprint in the American higher-education system[0] should not be ignored. It is one of the five largest donors to American colleges and universities, surpassing deep-pocketed contributors such as China and Saudi Arabia[1]. Even the president of the Brookings Institution resigned amid an FBI probe into Qatar-linked lobbying[2].
Consequently, when someone attempts to publish material about Qatar, particularly regarding its role in financing Hamas, they often hit a wall. As one case illustrates, “the editorial team has an issue with the fact that they have an upcoming partnership in December with Qatar. One of the directors flagged it as problematic and felt it might put them in a delicate position, so they prefer to run another piece with a lighter touch on the subject. Sorry.”[3]
Coming from a developing country where Islamists and anti-Western propaganda are pervasive, it is surreal to witness Western institutions falling, one by one, under the influence of autocratic and religiously extremist governments. This is where Western civilization appears to be declining: not because of “America First” politics, but because of low birth rates and an education system increasingly shaped by cash-rich foreign actors whose values diverge sharply from Western liberal principles.
He’s right, at least for the US: since the economic crisis of 2007–2009, Americans had fewer children, and that “demographic cliff” is starting to hit colleges, as the total (not just the sufficiently educated) pool of eighteen year olds available for recruitment is shrinking and will shrink 15% over the next 15 years.
It's an open secret that UK universities are propped up by international students paying crazy fees(as much as £35k/year) to come and study here, and most of them are from China. Even when I did my CS Masters degree at a Russel group university I'd say half of the course was international students paying full fees, I was repeatedly told by professors that they are vital to funding of the Computer Science school and university as a whole(which is insane considering how much home students are paying, but I digress).
Anecdotally - some of them(definitely not all, not even a majority) - clearly didn't care about actually learning anything, they just spent the entire day in the lab playing LoL or didn't actually turn up. In a private conversation with our professor he said he's basically not allowed to fail them even if they don't turn anything in, the funding they get is far too important. And they still have to somehow produce an MSc thesis at the end to get their degree, so in the eyes of the university they are still passing correctly to get their degree.
Either way - UK universities are too dependent on that funding to risk angering China which can easily make it a pain to go to UK to study.
> In a private conversation with our professor he said he's basically not allowed to fail them
About 10 yrs ago, I had 3 students in my chem class from Saudi Arabia who:
- could barely speak English (this is relevant)
- would fail my weekly quizzes miserably, using nigh incomprehensible English when they had to explain an answer.
- aced my first exam (3 highest grades!) using idiomatic English in all of their explanations (and they used the same idioms!).
Obviously, they were cheating. It's far too complicated to explain how they cheated, but man oh man my Dean did not want to hear about a group of cheating foreign students.
The Dean never told me that I couldn't fail them (I did fail them), but he did not want me to bring this 'problem' to him--and I could tell that if there were any political blow-back associated with their failing grades, it was going to be 'my fault.'
The main cheater even emailed me near the end of the semester and admitted he cheated, but explained that if I failed him, he would have to stay an extra semester to complete the course.
I had received a video call request from a German asst prof after I had applied for CS MS and a full scholarship to his department. I had written back saying I'd be okay with that and had asked whether he could tell me what it was about. He was upfront: "English proficiency satisfaction call" (yup, verbatim). 2-3 minutes into the call, he chuckled and said, "okay okay I am satisfied with your English". He was from Eastern Europe, and English wasn't his strongest suit, and he had to ask for meanings a few times. I am from an ex-GB colony. Anyway he mentioned that his department (and no other department there) faced a lot of situations from this part of the world where applicants had perfect GRE and TOEFL/IELTS scores but in reality they struggled with communication, and with laughter he added, "and your score had a big red flag". Mine were not perfect; just that my TOEFL and GRE verbal scores were at odds.
20 years ago, my engineering school accepted a Chinese student directly in 2nd year due to their home university results. Middle of the year he was offered to either go back to 1st year and use the next 6 months to learn passable French or get the fuck out.
No idea if it is still the way to handle foreign students nowadays tho. But I think that's how every school should handle foreign students: no special passes, asked to learn the language to integrate.
> he said he's basically not allowed to fail them even if they don't turn anything in, the funding they get is far too important.
In my country of origin, the prestigious universities were all public and (almost) free. The most sough after degrees are difficult to get in and difficult to finish.
There, the mentality is that the only reason why would you pay for a private university is if youre not smart enough to finish the degrees on your own. I always found it intriguing that the logic is reversed in the US - the good ones are the expensive ones and the only reason you wouldnt go there is if you cant afford it. But Im glad to see that the logic in my home country does have some merit, as evidenced by the quote from your professor.
This summary of the US logic for top tier schools is totally inaccurate, by the way.
The very best schools in the US: to choose a relatively uncontroversial list, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale -- all have need blind admissions, meaning they assess your ability to come whether or not you need financial aid. At least some (like Harvard) have sliding tuition scales that make the school totally free if family income is under $100k a year, or room and board only for family income under $200k a year, with some support continuing for families that make more than 200k.
Students want to go to these schools because they offer class mobility in the states alongside the excellent education.
Additionally you have to go well down the list of top tier universities and colleges in America before you get to one that spends less than tuition on its students. Yale states they spend about $90k over tuition per undergraduate for instance.
I remember reading that while the admissions were theoretically blind, in practice a nicely stuffed list of high-brow extracurriculars would give away the upper class candidates and thus undermine all attempts for actual class mobility.
"Need blind" here just means that your ability to pay the fees doesn't factor into the admissions decision, not that the admissions office doesn't know how wealthy you are (...since as you note, this is often easily inferred).
In other words, you won't be refused an offer simply because the university thinks you can't afford it.
The point being made here is that while the university claims they don't factor in the applicant's ability to pay the fees, they also conveniently ask for information which helps them infer your social status, making their claim somewhat more difficult to take at face value.
Bear in mind this is a thread discussing how UK universities are claiming in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are not being influenced by foreign governments. So we should be able to accept that universities are capable of lying about their internal practices.
"So we should be able to accept that universities"
We absolutely should. As of now, universities tend to get away with practices that would be called out in the private sector. Entshittification of some services plus greed plus willingness to bend your morality around someone's golden glove (which hides a fist...).
I remember reading a slightly different version of this. That the extra-curricular part of the application was originally designed to reduce the number of successful Jewish applicants. Jews were historically excluded from many sports, clubs, and associations.
I don't doubt that it's been kept around for the reason you described though.
A lot of universities across the west seem to have cargo cult copied the Harvard application model. Harvard are doing it so it must be good.
I'm really not a fan of this. I'm from a part of the world where it's practically impossible to describe your extra-curricular activities without giving away your ethnic background.
France is the same, the better universities are all public. But I know that the government spent an average of 35,000 euros per students at top public engineering schools in the early 2000s, not sure nowadays, so they do have funds it's just that the way of bringing money depends on actually being great academically.
Universities and engineering schools (something very French, think STEM specific universities) are free or very low-cost in France. But only for French students, students from the European Union, a few partnerships, etc.
Chinese and Indian students and the children of African diplomats pay ‘international’ fees. This is an international, mobile clientele with considerable means who have a choice. This represents a significant source of income.
In addition, the percentage of foreign students is taken into account in many rankings, prestige, etc. Therefore, public universities are also affected by this phenomenon.
I am French, not British, but more than ten years ago when I was at university, it was accepted that students who get selected for a year of exchange at a Chinese university would not do much, and no one expected much from Chinese students.
To put it simply, there was a principle of reciprocity: if the Chinese students passed their years, the French students would also pass theirs. If it became too difficult or the results were not as expected, it would become difficult for our students.
There were lots of tricks, with special exams in English or Chinese, catch-up work, etc. Who corrected the Chinese assignments in France? No idea.
It was also common knowledge that they had to bring back research documents to China. The lab manager left uninteresting documents lying around everywhere to control the phenomenon.
So nothing new, nothing has changed.
China has been very successful with its university rankings, with everyone scrambling to increase their foreign student numbers and collect tuition fees at the expense of academic results.
All this for the prestige of being ranked by a Chinese university.
Yes, as someone who regularly interviews candidates in the UK - if I see "foreign university I've never heard of + masters at a british university" then it is a huge negative signal, they are nearly always idiots. My favourite was the person with an MSc in CS from Edinburgh University who couldn't even do fizz-buzz level super-basic coding tasks.
At this point I just try and avoid selecting people for interview who fit this profile at all.
There have been "conversion course" MSc courses in UK universities for a long time - when I was doing a CS first degree the department ran one of these courses and, presumably to save money, the MSc folks would share some of our classes.
Usually they were completely lost but at the end of it they got a "better" degree than ours, which was annoying...
This is why when my son is old enough to choose a university, I'd probably try to advise him against doing undergrad in a UK or US university if he's studying STEM. Based on interviewing CS graduates, it doesn't seem that the level is that high in most UK/US universities compared to other countries (of course with the exclusion of the very top) and that seems partly due to a culture of pushing for profits over education and making it very hard to fail.
When I did CS at a UK university in the 1980s it was brutal - I was an idiot in my first year and had to retake maths 3 times meaning I slipped behind by a year. However, I eventually did learn my lesson(s) and did increasingly well over my second, third and fourth years - ending up with a 1st and being particularly fond (ironically) of the mathematical parts of the course.
We had quite a lot of foreign students on the course and they were all, without exception, completely awesome and great people to do a course with. Mind you, Norwegian moonshine is horrific...
Second paragraph rings true of my experience 10 or so years ago. But may depend on the university and the current funding environment is a bit different.
Exactly. Also, the same push for profit made cohort sizes for many courses extremely large, simultaneously making the more interesting/required (or if you a slacker, easy) classes extremely difficult to get in (first-come-first-serve basis, you need to ensure you are the first in the online line to get your seat) and the class sizes are too large to make learning interactive.
Funnily enough, as a full-fee paying international student, I had an easier time learning in India than in the US a decade or so ago; the only thing that made my masters education worthwhile was the research opportunities, the general quality of students, and an easier job market (at that time). Given that all three are in decline right now, I would not advise anyone to pursue masters abroad.
Without knowing anything about your situation, this sounds like a bad idea. I think roughly you want a university that is well-regarded[1] and hard to get into so that one’s attendance carries some signal.
[1] by well-regarded, I mean well-regarded by eg people at competently run well-paying firms who do hiring, rather than eg people who are really into politics and who have idiosyncratic opinions about particular universities
Oh I mean alternative would be a well regarded university/school in Germany or France... I'm French but we live in HK and most kids here (even the ones who go to the French International School or the German Swiss School) end up trying to go to UK or US universities. French and German international schools tend to not be that well ranked in the most well known rankings despite being very good technically (which is annoying when trying to get a visa to certain countries).
Part of my bias is that I was an exchange student at RIT and while I appreciated the experience, I was not impressed by the CS courses or the level of maths of the students going there.
IMO university in the U.K. feels expensive because (a) most people rarely have to directly pay for anything particularly expensive (house, wedding, maybe a car, not much else) so there is little grounding; (b) the British economy is in a poor state and no one has any money; (c) the ‘student loan’ phrasing is unhelpful; and (d) all the universities charge home students the same rate so none are really trying to justify their fees.
£9-10k a year sounds like a lot but it is eg not that far off the amortized cost of the various computer hardware I use for development at work. Similarly, the maintenance loans tend to be much lower than typical living costs for someone with a job but they were sufficient when I was a student. Maybe I was particularly fortunate as a student or I have a particularly expensive development environment at work.
I do think the dependence on foreign student fees is bad. Part of this is the government cutting funding massively and part is terrible management of the student visa system – universities should not have been allowed to be a backdoor way of paying for a U.K. visa as this hurt the legitimate use of the system.
When I was a student not so long ago but before the recent REF/funding/immigration changes, the international students (typically from the EU paying home fees, but also those from outside the EU paying full tuition) were clearly very able, often more so than home students. The most suspiciously moronic students seemed to be on de facto sports scholarships.
I just want to add here - I personally feel like an entire generation of people got absolutely betrayed by the government and put into unpayable debt just to go into university and no one really cared. If this happened in France, Paris would be on fire(well, more so than it usually is).
And what I mean by this - when I finished uni I had £12k debt, which I paid off after about 10 years of working, and it was on about 1% interest that entire time.
In contrast, my sister who finished university few years after me, has around £50k of student loan debt. And that loan is now on.....7% interest? It's insane. She is working full time and her payments are not even covering that interest, or barely cover it - she will never pay that loan off, it will eventually get written off. It's a constant 10% tax on all of her earnings, for 25 years(I think it's 30 now? or 35?) - except that this tax doesn't even go to the treasury.
It’s only like debt for the purposes of government budgeting. For a person, the ‘student loans’ are much more like a graduate tax which is weirdly regressive. The tax is only on monthly earnings above a certain level so lower earners pay a much lower effective rate than the marginal 9% rate. In particular, if you aren’t earning money you don’t pay, when you die your estate doesn’t pay anything, and if you go bankrupt the ‘debt’ is not written off.
£50k is a lot to your sister because of the sorry state of the British jobs market.
I can confirm. Russel group universities will grant masters degrees to people who do not show up for lectures, do not possess functional English, and do not perform the coursework. The exams are dumbed down to ensure a high pass rate. Everyone understands their job and pay depends on the international student fees.
They are vital in part because the universities increased spending to match the revenue they got from international students - i.e. when you can eat a lot you get fat.
Vice chancellors earn salaries that are often multiples of what the prime minister earns and pay at the senior levels is scaled from that - at the same time they take advantage of people who are full time academics at the start of their careers.
The whole system is old, creaky and probably needs widespread reform but it also won't get it until external factors force it.
> London has pretty much a bit of everything. And even next door boroughs can be polar opposites.
People say this in defence of the city. But I was an occasional visitor (usually seeing Uni mates). My experience as someone that occasionally used to visit to see friends was usually awful and expensive.
Just getting in an out of the city is generally difficult on public transport. It is like a 3 hour train ride and then another hour or two on the underground. Driving used to be OK (I've done it twice), but I've heard it has got worse.
I've been in London quite a bit during my 20s and 30s. I hate the place and I never went back after 2018.
- It is really expensive. This is coming from someone that grew up in Dorset (which is known for being expensive).
- People are constantly rude and aggressive. Usually there is like no reason for it.
- I had to pay a fine on the underground even though I had the London Travel for car for it (forgot what it was called now). I was treated as a criminal and forced to pay a fine on the spot. It was total BS.
- I got fined for getting lost and driving down the wrong street. I was less than 1 minute on that road before I realised my mistake and got a £80 fine. Also total BS.
- I had a man scream in my face because I went in the wrong lane at a junction.
- Had some guy rapping his Grime single presumably to sell CDs / iTunes album. I thought I was in a skit. Everyone was just waiting for the dude to shut up. Everyone had that look on their face of "not this shit again", as if it happens often.
- I had a man try to mug me in a Train station (Euston).
After that last incident decided, I am not ever going back to London.
> I don't think anyone can go London and think it is all bad unless you just don't like urban places.
London is awful. I used live in Dorset/Hampshire, every weekend there is literally an exodus from London to Hampshire and Dorset. Half the people I work with that go to London for work, hate it. So, it isn't just me.
I've lived in Southampton, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield (I used to travel a lot for work as a contractor / consultant) and while I wouldn't live in those places now, I don't hate them.
Yet another student block is going up in my expensive and popular London area. I'd much rather we had flats for people to live in less transiently, but money talks.
When the bubble bursts (and it will, probably due to immigration politics) we will have a load of empty, badly-built SROs unfit for normal habitation.
> They're building yet another student block in my expensive and popular London area. I'd much rather they build flats for people to live in less transiently, but they can make a lot more money from short term letting to foreign students.
That’s a better option than people buying flats in residential buildings and letting them out to students, which is what’s happening around White City with the new Imperial campus.
I know an international student from Asia. Them and their large group of friends already all know each other from their home country, come from the same couple of high schools, have a big society where they just party together for 3 years and then are given work visas. Pretty much a whole pipeline ready made. They just need to enter certain high schools in their country, get the bare minimum grades and it is all set for them in the UK (work, social life, accomodation).
I would take a guess and say most of their parents are also rich so accomodation even in West London is no problem.
This is not a poor student who worked their ass off to get to the UK storyline, this is a foreign program set up in the UK. Makes you wonder what the fuck is going on.
That's what the French government paid per year per student at my engineering school in the early 2000s. Tuition fees paid by the student were 540 euros a year, but the cost to the government was quite high.
My first job as a computer programmer after my CS degree paid £20k a year. If someone paid £35k/year to get that then I have a clown face emoji somewhere.
Dubious anti-China "research" meant as propaganda and China blocking the university page and asking to not continue this "research" is now intimidation. The UK and especially the BBC has been THE hotbed of anti-China misinformation.
It is appalling but not surprising. The UK isn't strong enough to stand up to China. Just look at the recent spy case which collapsed, much to the relief no doubt of the Foreign Office.
On a similar note Ivy League universities are taking far too much money from China and authoritarian Arab states.
It is not about "UK standing up to China". It is about UK universities becoming money making machines that depend on money coming with foreign students. If X is a big source of your income, then X gets to mandate how you operate, regardless of who X is. If UK universities did not have this kind of dependencies, then they would not have this kind of problems. If they did not need the chinese money that much in the first place, they would not have abided to such demands from China.
The soft power aspect of this dependency is a problem, but the bigger problem is that it has made UK universities dependent on a fundamentally unsustainable revenue stream. Chinese students come to study in the UK because British universities are perceived as better than Chinese universities, and that reputation rubs off on the students' own prospects when they return home.
But, that effect can only really last a couple of generations at most: the students go home, a proportion of them become (well-trained) academics, and the Chinese universities that those academics work at become competitive with the foreign universities. A similar thing happened with the "plate glass" universities of the 1960s UK; initially those were bootstrapped with Oxbridge academics, but within 30 years they were standing on their own feet.
As far as I can see, current UK universities have no plan to replace the revenue that will be inevitably lost when the Chinese universities also begin to stand up on their own feet.
It's sort of the same problem from different perspectives. If the UK deemed it could affort higher education without Chinese money, the UK would by default stand up to China, because of the incentives you describe.
I think the universities themselves are a problem, regardless of the societal aspect.
How I think about it:
Let us say, as a though experiment, that two things are true.
1. Outside of the university orgs, absolutely no one cares if the universities have enough resources to teach the engineers, scientists, teachers, doctors, etc. that society needs.
2. Outside of the university orgs, absolutely no one cares if half the people equipped to be good university teachers cannot find work.
In that hypothetical scenario, would the universities change? Saying no the Chinese etc. means that they would have to downsize.
And the embassy- despite standing up to an embassy or spying decision usually causing no drop in trade. Cowards and traitors all of them- selling their country out. Former KGB spies in the house of lords and running the aristocratic social scene - your country is a joke.
The UK Gov funding of universities does not cover their operational costs. I am not sure how we silently got ourselves into this position but the fact is that without foreign students the universities will run out of money. It's strange to me as some of these universities have portfolios of property in the billions of pounds. I would have thought more industry collaboration and smarter use of property could generate income for the universities. Unfortunately there are many high tech well funded industries that get constant campaigns against them on campuses, mostly by students not even in a related field.
I'm not sure how you fix this. The UK is sleep walking into becoming irrelevant.
I think that's a bit of an oversimplification to be fair, pretty much all of our "traditional" universities are absolutely capable of standing on their feet without international students, I mean if you look at the assets of just (any given) college at cambridge; they're swimming in money. Trinity (used to?) own the 02 arena as a fairly minor part of their holdings for example.
The story is very different for "ex-polys" like Sheffield Hallam, or oxford brooks many of whom absolutely trade on the basis of foreign students essentially propping up the entire operation more or less.
From my direct experience, even the Russel group universities are in a dire financial situation. At least that's the top down message, again being positive in cash for many years and owning property to me would be a good position but I have first hand knowledge of Russel group universities cutting staff/roles/courses and going after the foreign students as much as they can.
Some of this is their own making - for example the 'highly respected' universities not doing clearing so when their intake is lower than expected they don't top that up with 2nd choices.
Schools are now competing within universities to win student retention so their numbers don't look as bad / to help protect their budgets from being slashed further.
> pretty much all of our "traditional" universities are absolutely capable of standing on their feet without international students
This is simply not true. At least not currently possible. If the UK made the _strategic decision_ then I don't see why we couldn't, but currently if all foreign students boycott'd the UK then the majority of our universities would be bankrupt. (Again, in the way they are currently managed: they could sell property etc. but that's never considered.)
I dont have the data, but Oxford Brookes is actually an exception and I don't think the only one. It's awash with money because of the sheer volume of domestic wealthy attendees with various donations to various causes. Sheffield Hallam and most of the other polys aren't usually in quite the same position and your point stands.
I've looked at the data for some of the Russell Group and, coming from a US perspective, I was rather shocked at how reliant even top UK universities are on tuition. Apart from Oxbridge, they mostly don't have anywhere near the cashflow from endowments or alumni donations as the US Ivy League does.
I'm sure you're right (equally there's other exceptions) it was just the first ex-ploy that jumped to the top of my mind. The theme is true though.
> I am not sure how we silently got ourselves into this position
Two things:
1. converting all the old Polytechnics to Universities, in 1992, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_in_the_United_Kin...
followed by
2. trying to get '50%' of kids into further education https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/mar/08/johncarvel
The state already paid for education to the age of 18. Another 3 years of specialized education costs (the state) more. Getting more kids into HE, costs more even when they fees that are still state subsidized. Hence the increase in unsubsidised foreign students.
It's debatable whether the desired outcome of better educated and 'more employable' 21 year olds was actually achieved, or whether it simply removed a large cohort from the unemployment figures.
I found the anti-banking and anti-military campaigns on campus to be fantastic sources of information that helped me understand more of the reality of the companies who were trying to hire me. It was incredibly biased and performative, but so is the other side of the conversation.
Indeed, all info is good as long as you check the intended/implicit bias if nothing else it's indicative of what they want you to think about something.
For me I draw the line at military systems (though given the type of programming I do not really relevant) and gambling systems (which actually has come up before and was a lot more money but I decided that me looking in the mirror and liking the person looking back mattered more) - I don't presume to judge other people for it though, it's my personal choice.
At least some of the problem is the level of costs which are spent on admin activities instead of teaching (research is supposed to be separately funded although in reality it's messy). That's where I'd start.
The admin staff are very much underpaid in comparison to academic staff, and it would be impossible for the academic staff to manage without the admin staff. Also, there is fairly little admin staff at the school level compared to academic staff. When you get to "central" staff, then yes it's pretty much 100% admin/directors/c-level/etc. staff and I don't know what they do that's not being done by the hard worked school staff.
> I would have thought more industry collaboration and smarter use of property could generate income for the universities.
It probably could but Universities as with all organisations are going to take the easy path and trading in on the prestige of UK universities for foreign students is easier and more profitable.
We’ve known that China has been doing this for years to UK universities.. Significant numbers of foreign students are Chinese and universities rely on foreign students for income.
Given the funding and wealth mentioned by other commenters, I think "rely" might not be the right word. More that they are 'accustomed' to getting all this foreign student money. And they like it.
The international student Harry Potter experience economy model is not actually working for British universities. If your idea of a university is: outputting high quality research and developing the next cohort of researchers/other talented people who go into industry, etc.
Another lesser problem is the half-baked REF system.
The range of institutions called universities in the UK is large and I think you are conflating properties of one end of the range with properties of the other.
I disagree. Oxbridge, LSE, Edinburgh, etc appear equally as susceptible. In fact in top London universities it seems to be worse - prestige attracts more international students.
I also agree in the sense that there are less prestigious universities that appear to operate as if they are almost Chinese/in China.
Both are major concerns I would have thought.
Is this statement based on your recent undergraduate experience or on something else?
I don't need to divulge personal information to make a point. See comment below. I think it is pretty apparent to anyone with any interactions with universities in the U.K. and in other countries. The fact that it is now a geopolitical tool for China is pretty concerning.
Source: Went to UCL, they have a bunch of made up degrees that only international students sign up for.
They don't care. Universities have been taken over by parasites (like a lot of sectors).
Yeah it's just funny that its more akin to a sector in the tourism industry than academic or research. There are obviously pockets of world-class research and brilliant academics but the pressures in the opposite direction are pretty insane due to the business incentives.
Two HN posters telling each other “exaaaaactlyyyy”, and the premise is universities are same as tourism.
(full disclosure: I dropped out of state school with a 2.8 GPA in economics and got a job at Google 5 years later. yet, I can avoid this fallacy, so it's disturbing to see)
Congratulations on avoiding going to university.
The point about the tourism/finishing school aspect of universities in Britain is widely held and has been reported on for years. It was inevitable that it would provide China with leverage and other things. Not a good idea imo.
Alas, I did attend, but dropped out. (as noted)
We also went on a bit of a walk back from the bailey to the motte. "sector in the tourism industry" to "tourism/finishing school aspect" (tourism ~= finishing school now?).
Then, a vague hand wave towards "wide reporting" for...the original idea that universities are tourism? Or one of the new ones, like universities have an aspect of finishing school? Unclear.
My argument:
- U.K. universities have pivoted to being a finishing school (e.g. you cannot fail if you pay enough money) and Harry Potter experience for international students. -This affects all levels of prestige. Harms research. - Is a geopolitical leverage tool of unknown power. Interesting example linked by poster.
This is well known in most of Western Europe as a phenomena and some naive people love it because it makes short term profits: https://opportunities-insight.britishcouncil.org/short-artic...
Also I genuinely love your educational progression and kudos for it!
China should do some of their own research into Barbra Streisand.
Much has been said about China’s influence on Western universities, yet Qatar’s footprint in the American higher-education system[0] should not be ignored. It is one of the five largest donors to American colleges and universities, surpassing deep-pocketed contributors such as China and Saudi Arabia[1]. Even the president of the Brookings Institution resigned amid an FBI probe into Qatar-linked lobbying[2].
Consequently, when someone attempts to publish material about Qatar, particularly regarding its role in financing Hamas, they often hit a wall. As one case illustrates, “the editorial team has an issue with the fact that they have an upcoming partnership in December with Qatar. One of the directors flagged it as problematic and felt it might put them in a delicate position, so they prefer to run another piece with a lighter touch on the subject. Sorry.”[3]
Coming from a developing country where Islamists and anti-Western propaganda are pervasive, it is surreal to witness Western institutions falling, one by one, under the influence of autocratic and religiously extremist governments. This is where Western civilization appears to be declining: not because of “America First” politics, but because of low birth rates and an education system increasingly shaped by cash-rich foreign actors whose values diverge sharply from Western liberal principles.
[0]: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/04/02/qatars-footprint-in-...
[1]: https://quincyinst.org/research/soft-power-hard-influence-ho...
[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/brookings-president-res...
[3]: https://quillette.com/2025/10/31/the-qatar-problem-hamas-isr...
All university-related sources dated 2025. And casually mixing a lobbying case that has nothing to do with universities.
No, this is not made-up FUD at all.
Lol
"low birth rates"
fwiw, this was such a insane non sequitur that I immediately became skeptical of everything else you said
He’s right, at least for the US: since the economic crisis of 2007–2009, Americans had fewer children, and that “demographic cliff” is starting to hit colleges, as the total (not just the sufficiently educated) pool of eighteen year olds available for recruitment is shrinking and will shrink 15% over the next 15 years.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cli...
Colleges in the US are panicking over enrollment.
It's an open secret that UK universities are propped up by international students paying crazy fees(as much as £35k/year) to come and study here, and most of them are from China. Even when I did my CS Masters degree at a Russel group university I'd say half of the course was international students paying full fees, I was repeatedly told by professors that they are vital to funding of the Computer Science school and university as a whole(which is insane considering how much home students are paying, but I digress).
Anecdotally - some of them(definitely not all, not even a majority) - clearly didn't care about actually learning anything, they just spent the entire day in the lab playing LoL or didn't actually turn up. In a private conversation with our professor he said he's basically not allowed to fail them even if they don't turn anything in, the funding they get is far too important. And they still have to somehow produce an MSc thesis at the end to get their degree, so in the eyes of the university they are still passing correctly to get their degree.
Either way - UK universities are too dependent on that funding to risk angering China which can easily make it a pain to go to UK to study.
> In a private conversation with our professor he said he's basically not allowed to fail them
About 10 yrs ago, I had 3 students in my chem class from Saudi Arabia who:
- could barely speak English (this is relevant)
- would fail my weekly quizzes miserably, using nigh incomprehensible English when they had to explain an answer.
- aced my first exam (3 highest grades!) using idiomatic English in all of their explanations (and they used the same idioms!).
Obviously, they were cheating. It's far too complicated to explain how they cheated, but man oh man my Dean did not want to hear about a group of cheating foreign students.
The Dean never told me that I couldn't fail them (I did fail them), but he did not want me to bring this 'problem' to him--and I could tell that if there were any political blow-back associated with their failing grades, it was going to be 'my fault.'
The main cheater even emailed me near the end of the semester and admitted he cheated, but explained that if I failed him, he would have to stay an extra semester to complete the course.
I had received a video call request from a German asst prof after I had applied for CS MS and a full scholarship to his department. I had written back saying I'd be okay with that and had asked whether he could tell me what it was about. He was upfront: "English proficiency satisfaction call" (yup, verbatim). 2-3 minutes into the call, he chuckled and said, "okay okay I am satisfied with your English". He was from Eastern Europe, and English wasn't his strongest suit, and he had to ask for meanings a few times. I am from an ex-GB colony. Anyway he mentioned that his department (and no other department there) faced a lot of situations from this part of the world where applicants had perfect GRE and TOEFL/IELTS scores but in reality they struggled with communication, and with laughter he added, "and your score had a big red flag". Mine were not perfect; just that my TOEFL and GRE verbal scores were at odds.
That's a great story, and I wish this could be the standard practice.
I'm pretty sure the school where my students were enrolled knew that they admitted students with fraudulent TOEFL scores, but they needed the $$$.
20 years ago, my engineering school accepted a Chinese student directly in 2nd year due to their home university results. Middle of the year he was offered to either go back to 1st year and use the next 6 months to learn passable French or get the fuck out.
No idea if it is still the way to handle foreign students nowadays tho. But I think that's how every school should handle foreign students: no special passes, asked to learn the language to integrate.
> he said he's basically not allowed to fail them even if they don't turn anything in, the funding they get is far too important.
In my country of origin, the prestigious universities were all public and (almost) free. The most sough after degrees are difficult to get in and difficult to finish.
There, the mentality is that the only reason why would you pay for a private university is if youre not smart enough to finish the degrees on your own. I always found it intriguing that the logic is reversed in the US - the good ones are the expensive ones and the only reason you wouldnt go there is if you cant afford it. But Im glad to see that the logic in my home country does have some merit, as evidenced by the quote from your professor.
This summary of the US logic for top tier schools is totally inaccurate, by the way.
The very best schools in the US: to choose a relatively uncontroversial list, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale -- all have need blind admissions, meaning they assess your ability to come whether or not you need financial aid. At least some (like Harvard) have sliding tuition scales that make the school totally free if family income is under $100k a year, or room and board only for family income under $200k a year, with some support continuing for families that make more than 200k.
Students want to go to these schools because they offer class mobility in the states alongside the excellent education.
Additionally you have to go well down the list of top tier universities and colleges in America before you get to one that spends less than tuition on its students. Yale states they spend about $90k over tuition per undergraduate for instance.
I remember reading that while the admissions were theoretically blind, in practice a nicely stuffed list of high-brow extracurriculars would give away the upper class candidates and thus undermine all attempts for actual class mobility.
IDK if this is true.
"Need blind" here just means that your ability to pay the fees doesn't factor into the admissions decision, not that the admissions office doesn't know how wealthy you are (...since as you note, this is often easily inferred).
In other words, you won't be refused an offer simply because the university thinks you can't afford it.
The point being made here is that while the university claims they don't factor in the applicant's ability to pay the fees, they also conveniently ask for information which helps them infer your social status, making their claim somewhat more difficult to take at face value.
Bear in mind this is a thread discussing how UK universities are claiming in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are not being influenced by foreign governments. So we should be able to accept that universities are capable of lying about their internal practices.
"So we should be able to accept that universities"
We absolutely should. As of now, universities tend to get away with practices that would be called out in the private sector. Entshittification of some services plus greed plus willingness to bend your morality around someone's golden glove (which hides a fist...).
I remember reading a slightly different version of this. That the extra-curricular part of the application was originally designed to reduce the number of successful Jewish applicants. Jews were historically excluded from many sports, clubs, and associations.
I don't doubt that it's been kept around for the reason you described though.
A lot of universities across the west seem to have cargo cult copied the Harvard application model. Harvard are doing it so it must be good.
I'm really not a fan of this. I'm from a part of the world where it's practically impossible to describe your extra-curricular activities without giving away your ethnic background.
France is the same, the better universities are all public. But I know that the government spent an average of 35,000 euros per students at top public engineering schools in the early 2000s, not sure nowadays, so they do have funds it's just that the way of bringing money depends on actually being great academically.
Universities and engineering schools (something very French, think STEM specific universities) are free or very low-cost in France. But only for French students, students from the European Union, a few partnerships, etc.
Chinese and Indian students and the children of African diplomats pay ‘international’ fees. This is an international, mobile clientele with considerable means who have a choice. This represents a significant source of income.
In addition, the percentage of foreign students is taken into account in many rankings, prestige, etc. Therefore, public universities are also affected by this phenomenon.
I am French, not British, but more than ten years ago when I was at university, it was accepted that students who get selected for a year of exchange at a Chinese university would not do much, and no one expected much from Chinese students.
To put it simply, there was a principle of reciprocity: if the Chinese students passed their years, the French students would also pass theirs. If it became too difficult or the results were not as expected, it would become difficult for our students.
There were lots of tricks, with special exams in English or Chinese, catch-up work, etc. Who corrected the Chinese assignments in France? No idea.
It was also common knowledge that they had to bring back research documents to China. The lab manager left uninteresting documents lying around everywhere to control the phenomenon.
So nothing new, nothing has changed.
China has been very successful with its university rankings, with everyone scrambling to increase their foreign student numbers and collect tuition fees at the expense of academic results.
All this for the prestige of being ranked by a Chinese university.
Yes, as someone who regularly interviews candidates in the UK - if I see "foreign university I've never heard of + masters at a british university" then it is a huge negative signal, they are nearly always idiots. My favourite was the person with an MSc in CS from Edinburgh University who couldn't even do fizz-buzz level super-basic coding tasks.
At this point I just try and avoid selecting people for interview who fit this profile at all.
There have been "conversion course" MSc courses in UK universities for a long time - when I was doing a CS first degree the department ran one of these courses and, presumably to save money, the MSc folks would share some of our classes.
Usually they were completely lost but at the end of it they got a "better" degree than ours, which was annoying...
This is why when my son is old enough to choose a university, I'd probably try to advise him against doing undergrad in a UK or US university if he's studying STEM. Based on interviewing CS graduates, it doesn't seem that the level is that high in most UK/US universities compared to other countries (of course with the exclusion of the very top) and that seems partly due to a culture of pushing for profits over education and making it very hard to fail.
When I did CS at a UK university in the 1980s it was brutal - I was an idiot in my first year and had to retake maths 3 times meaning I slipped behind by a year. However, I eventually did learn my lesson(s) and did increasingly well over my second, third and fourth years - ending up with a 1st and being particularly fond (ironically) of the mathematical parts of the course.
We had quite a lot of foreign students on the course and they were all, without exception, completely awesome and great people to do a course with. Mind you, Norwegian moonshine is horrific...
Second paragraph rings true of my experience 10 or so years ago. But may depend on the university and the current funding environment is a bit different.
Exactly. Also, the same push for profit made cohort sizes for many courses extremely large, simultaneously making the more interesting/required (or if you a slacker, easy) classes extremely difficult to get in (first-come-first-serve basis, you need to ensure you are the first in the online line to get your seat) and the class sizes are too large to make learning interactive.
Funnily enough, as a full-fee paying international student, I had an easier time learning in India than in the US a decade or so ago; the only thing that made my masters education worthwhile was the research opportunities, the general quality of students, and an easier job market (at that time). Given that all three are in decline right now, I would not advise anyone to pursue masters abroad.
Without knowing anything about your situation, this sounds like a bad idea. I think roughly you want a university that is well-regarded[1] and hard to get into so that one’s attendance carries some signal.
[1] by well-regarded, I mean well-regarded by eg people at competently run well-paying firms who do hiring, rather than eg people who are really into politics and who have idiosyncratic opinions about particular universities
Oh I mean alternative would be a well regarded university/school in Germany or France... I'm French but we live in HK and most kids here (even the ones who go to the French International School or the German Swiss School) end up trying to go to UK or US universities. French and German international schools tend to not be that well ranked in the most well known rankings despite being very good technically (which is annoying when trying to get a visa to certain countries).
Part of my bias is that I was an exchange student at RIT and while I appreciated the experience, I was not impressed by the CS courses or the level of maths of the students going there.
Maybe ETH Zurich does a good job both of being somewhat outside the anglosphere but also well regarded.
IMO university in the U.K. feels expensive because (a) most people rarely have to directly pay for anything particularly expensive (house, wedding, maybe a car, not much else) so there is little grounding; (b) the British economy is in a poor state and no one has any money; (c) the ‘student loan’ phrasing is unhelpful; and (d) all the universities charge home students the same rate so none are really trying to justify their fees.
£9-10k a year sounds like a lot but it is eg not that far off the amortized cost of the various computer hardware I use for development at work. Similarly, the maintenance loans tend to be much lower than typical living costs for someone with a job but they were sufficient when I was a student. Maybe I was particularly fortunate as a student or I have a particularly expensive development environment at work.
I do think the dependence on foreign student fees is bad. Part of this is the government cutting funding massively and part is terrible management of the student visa system – universities should not have been allowed to be a backdoor way of paying for a U.K. visa as this hurt the legitimate use of the system.
When I was a student not so long ago but before the recent REF/funding/immigration changes, the international students (typically from the EU paying home fees, but also those from outside the EU paying full tuition) were clearly very able, often more so than home students. The most suspiciously moronic students seemed to be on de facto sports scholarships.
I just want to add here - I personally feel like an entire generation of people got absolutely betrayed by the government and put into unpayable debt just to go into university and no one really cared. If this happened in France, Paris would be on fire(well, more so than it usually is).
And what I mean by this - when I finished uni I had £12k debt, which I paid off after about 10 years of working, and it was on about 1% interest that entire time. In contrast, my sister who finished university few years after me, has around £50k of student loan debt. And that loan is now on.....7% interest? It's insane. She is working full time and her payments are not even covering that interest, or barely cover it - she will never pay that loan off, it will eventually get written off. It's a constant 10% tax on all of her earnings, for 25 years(I think it's 30 now? or 35?) - except that this tax doesn't even go to the treasury.
It’s only like debt for the purposes of government budgeting. For a person, the ‘student loans’ are much more like a graduate tax which is weirdly regressive. The tax is only on monthly earnings above a certain level so lower earners pay a much lower effective rate than the marginal 9% rate. In particular, if you aren’t earning money you don’t pay, when you die your estate doesn’t pay anything, and if you go bankrupt the ‘debt’ is not written off.
£50k is a lot to your sister because of the sorry state of the British jobs market.
I can confirm. Russel group universities will grant masters degrees to people who do not show up for lectures, do not possess functional English, and do not perform the coursework. The exams are dumbed down to ensure a high pass rate. Everyone understands their job and pay depends on the international student fees.
They are vital in part because the universities increased spending to match the revenue they got from international students - i.e. when you can eat a lot you get fat.
Vice chancellors earn salaries that are often multiples of what the prime minister earns and pay at the senior levels is scaled from that - at the same time they take advantage of people who are full time academics at the start of their careers.
The whole system is old, creaky and probably needs widespread reform but it also won't get it until external factors force it.
I've heard stories of like high level Gaming PCs and other expensive items just being left in University Halls after those Students leave.
These lot pay premium rent in places like Canary Wharf no problem. Basically stuff that >90% of the population could not afford.
TBF you couldn't pay me to Live in London.
London has pretty much a bit of everything. And even next door boroughs can be polar opposites.
I don't think anyone can go London and think it is all bad unless you just don't like urban places.
> London has pretty much a bit of everything. And even next door boroughs can be polar opposites.
People say this in defence of the city. But I was an occasional visitor (usually seeing Uni mates). My experience as someone that occasionally used to visit to see friends was usually awful and expensive.
Just getting in an out of the city is generally difficult on public transport. It is like a 3 hour train ride and then another hour or two on the underground. Driving used to be OK (I've done it twice), but I've heard it has got worse.
I've been in London quite a bit during my 20s and 30s. I hate the place and I never went back after 2018.
- It is really expensive. This is coming from someone that grew up in Dorset (which is known for being expensive).
- People are constantly rude and aggressive. Usually there is like no reason for it.
- I had to pay a fine on the underground even though I had the London Travel for car for it (forgot what it was called now). I was treated as a criminal and forced to pay a fine on the spot. It was total BS.
- I got fined for getting lost and driving down the wrong street. I was less than 1 minute on that road before I realised my mistake and got a £80 fine. Also total BS.
- I had a man scream in my face because I went in the wrong lane at a junction.
- Had some guy rapping his Grime single presumably to sell CDs / iTunes album. I thought I was in a skit. Everyone was just waiting for the dude to shut up. Everyone had that look on their face of "not this shit again", as if it happens often.
- I had a man try to mug me in a Train station (Euston).
After that last incident decided, I am not ever going back to London.
> I don't think anyone can go London and think it is all bad unless you just don't like urban places.
London is awful. I used live in Dorset/Hampshire, every weekend there is literally an exodus from London to Hampshire and Dorset. Half the people I work with that go to London for work, hate it. So, it isn't just me.
I've lived in Southampton, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield (I used to travel a lot for work as a contractor / consultant) and while I wouldn't live in those places now, I don't hate them.
Yet another student block is going up in my expensive and popular London area. I'd much rather we had flats for people to live in less transiently, but money talks.
When the bubble bursts (and it will, probably due to immigration politics) we will have a load of empty, badly-built SROs unfit for normal habitation.
> They're building yet another student block in my expensive and popular London area. I'd much rather they build flats for people to live in less transiently, but they can make a lot more money from short term letting to foreign students.
That’s a better option than people buying flats in residential buildings and letting them out to students, which is what’s happening around White City with the new Imperial campus.
I know an international student from Asia. Them and their large group of friends already all know each other from their home country, come from the same couple of high schools, have a big society where they just party together for 3 years and then are given work visas. Pretty much a whole pipeline ready made. They just need to enter certain high schools in their country, get the bare minimum grades and it is all set for them in the UK (work, social life, accomodation).
I would take a guess and say most of their parents are also rich so accomodation even in West London is no problem.
This is not a poor student who worked their ass off to get to the UK storyline, this is a foreign program set up in the UK. Makes you wonder what the fuck is going on.
Please name the country rather than just "Asia".
> Makes you wonder what the fuck is going on.
Last breaths of a dying empire. UK is trying to make a quick buck on its prestige before it's gone.
Maybe getting sidetracked here by the least important detail, but 35k / year doesn't sound very crazy.
That only doesnt look crazy if youre used to American numbers. Anywhere else in the world thats crazy expensive.
That's what the French government paid per year per student at my engineering school in the early 2000s. Tuition fees paid by the student were 540 euros a year, but the cost to the government was quite high.
If that doesn't seem crazy, then that shows just how insanely expensive college has become on average these days.
That’s like the average salary here.
My first job as a computer programmer after my CS degree paid £20k a year. If someone paid £35k/year to get that then I have a clown face emoji somewhere.
I always wonder why some stories get flagged and others do not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790447
Are they taking lessons from the US administration?
The converse - the US regime took lessons from other dictatorships.
Hitler was inspired by the US btw.
If you need to hide from China you're safe in a Western country. If you need to hide from America you need to go to Moscow.
Wonder how long it will take before the Chinese are powerful enough that they can launch missile strikes? Or put bombs in mobile phones?
This is depressing
Dubious anti-China "research" meant as propaganda and China blocking the university page and asking to not continue this "research" is now intimidation. The UK and especially the BBC has been THE hotbed of anti-China misinformation.
Is it at all possible a defamation lawsuit is just that? If this is considered a form of intimidation, such things happen all the time in the west.
It is appalling but not surprising. The UK isn't strong enough to stand up to China. Just look at the recent spy case which collapsed, much to the relief no doubt of the Foreign Office.
On a similar note Ivy League universities are taking far too much money from China and authoritarian Arab states.
It is not about "UK standing up to China". It is about UK universities becoming money making machines that depend on money coming with foreign students. If X is a big source of your income, then X gets to mandate how you operate, regardless of who X is. If UK universities did not have this kind of dependencies, then they would not have this kind of problems. If they did not need the chinese money that much in the first place, they would not have abided to such demands from China.
The soft power aspect of this dependency is a problem, but the bigger problem is that it has made UK universities dependent on a fundamentally unsustainable revenue stream. Chinese students come to study in the UK because British universities are perceived as better than Chinese universities, and that reputation rubs off on the students' own prospects when they return home.
But, that effect can only really last a couple of generations at most: the students go home, a proportion of them become (well-trained) academics, and the Chinese universities that those academics work at become competitive with the foreign universities. A similar thing happened with the "plate glass" universities of the 1960s UK; initially those were bootstrapped with Oxbridge academics, but within 30 years they were standing on their own feet.
As far as I can see, current UK universities have no plan to replace the revenue that will be inevitably lost when the Chinese universities also begin to stand up on their own feet.
It's sort of the same problem from different perspectives. If the UK deemed it could affort higher education without Chinese money, the UK would by default stand up to China, because of the incentives you describe.
I think the universities themselves are a problem, regardless of the societal aspect.
How I think about it:
Let us say, as a though experiment, that two things are true.
1. Outside of the university orgs, absolutely no one cares if the universities have enough resources to teach the engineers, scientists, teachers, doctors, etc. that society needs.
2. Outside of the university orgs, absolutely no one cares if half the people equipped to be good university teachers cannot find work.
In that hypothetical scenario, would the universities change? Saying no the Chinese etc. means that they would have to downsize.
It is about Sheffield–Hallam university.
And the embassy- despite standing up to an embassy or spying decision usually causing no drop in trade. Cowards and traitors all of them- selling their country out. Former KGB spies in the house of lords and running the aristocratic social scene - your country is a joke.
Signed off by Boris Johnson. No surprises there.
"Pay the piper ..."