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Anyone working in universities will tell you foreign students don’t crowd out domestic ones, they subsidise domestic ones (sling with research). If the govt wants to end that subsidy (and the pandemic exposure which comes without) then it needs to spend more on HE & research https://twitter.com/will_tanner/status/1286188077682167808
(Along with research not sling with research)
Reforming HE is a good idea. But it requires diagnosing the problem correctly. Foreign students aren’t the problem, govt underfunding which leaves universities dependent on them is the problem.
Reforming HE is a good idea. But it requires diagnosing the problem correctly. Foreign students aren’t the problem, govt underfunding which leaves universities dependent on them is the problem.
For 20 years U.K. govts have had their cake and eaten it on HE - world class research and domestic expansion delivered on the cheap. Foreign students are how that circle got squared. If we want gold standard research and growing HE access without their fees we have to pay for it.
To be fair to Tanner and Onward they do make greater government funding a key recommendation (though with the usual Whitehall winner-picking caveats) and they are right to highlight concerns about exposure to foreign autocracies
However one cause of that exposure which the report overlooks was Home Office migration policy under Cameron and May - which made study I’m in the UK less attractive to students from many countries (particularly by cutting off post graduation work options)
It was both predictable and widely predicted at the time that this would damage the university sector and leave it widely exposed. It was also pointless from a public opinion perspective as voters supported liberal rules on student migration
Cameron and May didn’t listen as they were obsessed with their pointless, and now defunct and unlamented net migration target. May even invented statistics on students overstaying their visas to justify her draconian policies
So while a reconsideration is welcome a bit more honesty about the causes of these problems would be too.
In addition the report is near to silent on social mobility and access. One of it’s recommendations is funding expansion of STEM by cutting back places on “low value” non STEM courses. That will increase dominance of middle class and privately educated at uni
The effect of this will be far larger I suspect than any impact from cutting foreign students because the crowding out effect claimed here doesn’t exist while middle class and private school dominance of high tariff courses is very real.
Cutting opportunities to access HE for disadvantaged students would be a particularly cruel blow at a time where Coronavirus is deepening educational inequalities, with private school kids on daily zoom lessons while state school kids make do with a fortnightly phone call
Here's Nobel Prize winning graphene inventor and University of Manchester Professor Andre Geim pointing out the damage Con immigration policies were doing to the sector in 2012 - had such policies existed when he arrived he would not have been able to stay https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nobel-winner-slates-britains-stupid-immigration-reforms-8433324.html
And here's some of the reporting on the overstay statistics May invented to justify irrational, draconian policies which have left the sector damaged and exposed: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/theresa-may-under-fire-as-uk-s-student-overstay-figures-discredited-1.3198042
