Foreign money is destroying British higher education

How has systemic reliance on international students in postgraduate education affected our most prestigious institutions?

The nature of postgraduate teaching in ostensibly and traditionally prestigious and research-intensive British Russell Group universities has been transformed over the past decade. No longer do these institutions provide expert teaching for people aiming to become exceptionally well-versed in specialist fields, whether for reasons of career advancement or pure academic interest. Instead, they offer dumbed-down and uninspired tutelage on sub-undergraduate level material, catered towards international students who pay hand-over-fist for certificates of qualification with little concern for what they actually learn from the course itself.

A number of glaring issues coalesce to construct this perfect storm. A willingness to accept flagrant flouting of English language requirements and brazen academic fraud on the part of university administrations hungry for foreign cash has been supercharged by the mass adoption of AI to provide live translation services in seminars and even to produce work output, all of which has largely been ignored by institutions with a vested interest in turning a blind eye. My own experience, as well as that of another recent MSc graduate from a university with similarly deep historical roots, provides an insightful case study on how Master’s teaching has increasingly become nothing but a way for foreign nationals to buy credentials (and often visas), rendering British students a minority within their cohorts at most top institutions. Having explored how we got here, I will offer some tentative proposals to restore merit-based education in Britain and ensure our academic institutions serve British young people as they should.

The Problems

For any academically minded student, perhaps the core promise of university as an intellectual environment is the opportunity to pursue a discipline alongside a cohort of similarly passionate and intelligent peers — a prospect made all the more exciting by the opposite experience provided by comprehensive schooling. Especially in the humanities, there is often as much to be gained from conversation and engagement with peers as from lectures by professors, yet the flooding of undergraduate courses by those who have little ability and less interest in their subject of choice and who seek only an entrance pass into professional society has almost entirely removed that dynamic from the seminar room, even at the most prestigious institutions. My hope, then, upon entering postgraduate education, was to finally come upon the intellectual environment I had always hoped for: a departure from the mundane, run-of-the-mill lecture topics that pervade undergraduate teaching and the opportunity to engage seriously with my chosen discipline alongside my peers. The reality was starkly different.

Let’s begin with an obvious truth: it is hard to have a meaningful conversation with someone who can barely speak the language. The first sign that this was going to be a problem came during my earliest lectures, hard as it was not to notice the widespread use of real-time AI translation services by international students struggling to keep up with the content as delivered in English. Perhaps that much could be excused — lectures can move at pace, and are often the first time that complicated concepts are explicated. Yet in many cases, these same tools were also leant upon in seminars, with students typing in their responses in their native language to facilitate a stuttering rendition of ChatGPT’s translated English script whenever they were asked a question. Of course, it’s impossible to know whether these responses truly were mere translations, or whether the content itself was generated by the agent at least in part — but the regularity with which these students descended into silence when asked a follow up from their response indicates the latter possibility.

Perhaps the most egregious effect of this lack of English language fluency was on group discussion tasks. Simply not having the ability to speak the official language of study well is one thing; in many cases, international students proved entirely unwilling to even make the attempt to communicate in anything other than their native language, often looking with total bemusement at British students who were speaking or asking questions, either ignoring their discussion entirely or declining to participate when invited. The issue here barely needs pointing out: how are British students supposed to engage meaningfully with the subjects at hand, develop the requisite intellectual skills, and explore their own ideas if most of their peers are unable to participate in conversation outside of regurgitating AI-generated scripts, and unwilling to even make the attempt?

The course instructors were, of course, entirely aware of what was going on, and completely understood the deleterious consequences that this behaviour would be having on British students making a genuine attempt to develop their academic understanding. Nevertheless, nothing was done to improve the situation. No encouragement was provided to international students to improve their understanding of English. No punishments were enforced against the pervasive use of AI. That the denial of proper education to British students was ignored by those in charge of delivering it confers responsibility for that phenomenon directly upon them. They are, in effect, aiding and abetting a system which places British students at the bottom of the priority list. This is representative of the institutional view within ostensibly elite institutions that international students are never to be challenged, partly because the suggestion that someone does not have sufficient grasp of English to study in the language carries the faint whiff of fascism, but primarily because doing so would place the tremendous flow of overseas money into British universities at risk.

It is not only British students who are defrauded by this system. To qualify for an international student visa, the Home Office requires applicants to prove English proficiency that is ‘equivalent to CEFR level B2’, which would mean that the individual is able to independently understand and engage with complex texts and communicate fluently with native speakers. Simply put, it is not plausible that even a slim majority of the international students in my postgraduate seminars could have legitimately proved such abilities. If these students did in fact have these skills, why were they so unwilling to use them when doing so would have made their lives and everyone else’s so much easier, not to mention that it would have been to their own educational benefit? If they did not, how are the universities not participating in the defrauding of the visa system that they must have committed in order to be here?

We should not, however, be surprised that this negligence and dishonesty has become so rampant. There is essentially zero incentive for course administrators to tackle the pervasive and increasingly severe examples of academic misconduct which are ruining postgraduate teaching. As mentioned, international students pay eye-watering amounts of money both in the form of tuition fees and student accommodation rent (which is in many cases rented out by the university itself). Disengaged students enable professors to rest on their laurels. In most cases, academic misconduct is easily reframed as a problem of ‘inclusivity’ within teaching materials. There is very little oversight and less enforcement from the state or from regulators, both of which are often just as happy to allow this situation to persist. Successive governments have used universities as a vehicle for delivering financial support to otherwise economically struggling places, and are quite happy for this to be funded by the fees of international students. For Labour especially, this has the pleasant side-effect of turning previously competitive areas of small-town England (notably including both Warwick & Leamington and Canterbury) into safe Labour seats.

Some might be tempted to suggest that the problem goes beyond international students, and is in fact part of the general lowering of academic standards which has accompanied the democratisation of higher education since 1997. Whether or not there may be some truth in that, I saw first hand the impact that simply addressing this problem can have on course quality. The few optional modules that were disproportionately preferred by British students (or by the relatively fluent in English Europeans) offered a markedly better opportunity for academic engagement. Deep engagement with the granular details of required readings was the norm in such classes. Conversations flowed freely, and mutual criticism provided a genuinely valuable source of learning. Group tasks were completed efficiently, and the process of doing so was productive. None of this was the case in modules with a more representative take-up.

These issues are not simply an inconvenience or an annoyance for domestic students. In fact, they largely destroy the basis for embarking on postgraduate study. Traditionally, there were a few reasons that one might pursue a master’s in one’s chosen subject. Bookish aspiring academics who had real enthusiasm for research-intensive study would begin their intellectual journey proper at this stage, developing the tools which would ultimately allow them to make their own contributions later in their career. Current professionals, perhaps especially those looking to make some sort of career pivot, could use other courses as an opportunity to develop meaningful and productive skills and advance their prospects in the private sector. Graduates looking to enter technical industries which genuinely required study beyond undergraduate level required specialist courses before entering the workplace. All of these goals are economically, socially, and intellectually crucial, yet none can be achieved whilst these issues continue to plague British education. This situation therefore needs urgent remedy.

The Solutions

How might we attempt to do so? A simple answer to the problem of excess international students would of course be to bar them from admissions, or at least heavily restrict their numbers. This, however, would have sharp downsides. Higher education is expensive. Young people already struggle to handle its current costs, and the state does not have the fiscal headroom to pick up the tab. Subsidizing these costs with international student fees is not a bad idea, provided the issues currently being experienced can be addressed. It is also worth noting that, much as ‘soft power’ is a widely abused concept, Britain wins some advantages by being the educational destination of choice for foreign elites. Having such people spend what for most students are the best years of their lives in our country inevitably creates positive feeling towards us which works to our advantage in all sorts of tangible and intangible ways. The question, then, is how to ensure that strict selective criteria are applied which ensure that those international students we continue to take do not have a deleterious effect on the quality of education.

First and foremost, in-person, closed-book, independently administered English language proficiency tests must be made mandatory for all international students. These tests could be undertaken once international students have arrived at their chosen institution so as to avoid forcing students to travel potentially great distances just for a single examination, but on the understanding that failure to achieve a satisfactory score would mean that the student’s enrolment at their university would be cancelled and their student visa would be revoked. Universities could also be required to review their student admissions process following any such incident, indicative as it would be of an insufficiently stringent set of assessment criteria.

Universities could also have the privilege of admitting international students revoked, either in its entirety or through the imposition of a harsh cap on numbers, when found to be failing in their duties to enforce academic integrity and admissions standards. This could be policed in several ways, including unannounced audits of demonstrated English language fluency in classrooms and enforcement of language requirements in admissions, as well as randomly chosen assessments of international students against their ability to defend a representative example of their submitted work that proves individual creation and a fluent grasp on the relevant concepts to an appropriate postgraduate standard, with universities required to review their enforcement mechanisms if the failure rate on these assessments climbed above a certain level.

Regulators should also enforce academic standards by requiring that courses are taught to the historically appropriate level of sophistication, regardless of the composition of their cohort. If universities decide to dumb down the level at which postgraduate courses are taught so that more students might be able to undertake them, the opportunity to take an actual postgraduate course is removed from those who deserve it. Each course at each university should therefore receive specific scrutiny from an academic watchdog which has the power to enforce fines, refunds, or even the closure of courses not demonstrating teaching standards at the expected level.

Scottish universities (whose administration is a devolved matter) require specific measures in addition to these general recommendations. Scottish students do not pay tuition fees, with the Scottish government (using money from Westminster) instead paying £1,820 per Scottish student to each university. This is then supplemented by grants from the Scottish Funding Council. The system creates a payment-to-teaching-cost shortfall of £2,000-£7,000 per Scottish student, leaving a sector-wide shortfall of around £288m, with SFC / SAAS / Scottish Government payments covering only 82% of teaching costs per Scottish student. The ancient universities (Glasgow, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Aberdeen) have offset this by increasing their intake of international students, who pay far more in tuition fees. SFC have admitted that such elite institutions have become dangerously reliant on international student fees, and this is reflected in non-EU tuition fees accounting for 58.1% of teaching income in ancient universities.

To fix this (and fixing a fundamental unfairness in the British educational system, through which Scottish students are given a privilege unavailable to any others simply because their devolved government has no requirement to be fiscally responsible and can rely on English subsidy to provide benefits which secure its re-election) would require the abolition of free tuition in Scotland and the introduction of a tuition fee paid directly by students. This would allow institutions to adjust rates so that domestic students pay more of the cost of their own education, reducing reliance on international student fees. This would also dilute the financial clout of international students, and thus reduce the pressure on universities to ignore their misconduct.

These measures represent the necessary first steps to averting the further decline of British higher education, restoring domestic students to the top of the priority list, and ensuring that our universities can continue to play their necessary role in British academic and professional life. Theirs is one example among many of public and semi-public institutions which have developed their own sectoral interests which they now pursue at the expense of their proper part in a functioning society. Others may seem to have a broader impact, but no issue is more important for the long-term health of a nation than ensuring its most talented individuals are able to maximise their potential. We cannot continue to squander that talent.

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This article was written by Aaron Burns and Oliver Daneel, Pimlico Journal contributors. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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