Universities enrolling foreign students with poor English, BBC finds
bbc.com
bbc.com
The students get to go home to their own country with a prestigious UK degree, and the UK university gets to stay in business. The quality of the learning .. well, that's not in the financial reports, is it?
International students also get on courses with lower grades than UK students.
As for the second assertion, that’s just false. I had to apply for a graduate degree as an international student before my citizenship was awarded, the course requirements were explicitly identical, the only different was vastly higher fees and proof of both funding capacity and English language proficiency.
Strangely few of them leave. There is a lot of "grass is greener" in British pessimism about their country.
> neither do most of the international students I’ve met
Most do not, but most never did. Most people prefer to live in their home country (especially if they are the sort that can afford overseas fees). That said they may want a degree that is recognised internationally (e.g. they get a cheaper degree that will be recognised in the US where salaries are much higher).
There are also a significant proportion who do want to stay. As someone with dual nationality the UK is my preferred place to live.
Talk to your average kid stuck in 90% of the one-time industrial towns north of London and the grass isn’t just greener… the fact they’ll never be able to afford to go doesn’t mean they wouldn’t at the drop of a hat if they could.
> Most do not, but most never did
There’s no obviously valid complaint about those who come here, pay international fees, maybe work a few years while paying taxes and NHS premiums, then go elsewhere or home.
Come to think of it there’s very little obvious complaint about those who choose to come here legally, get an education at inflated cost to subsidize lower fees for the locals who tend not to avail themselves of them, then immigrate instead.
Except, that is, from the older folk in those post-industrial towns, who don’t want to go anywhere they might have to speak foreign or eat anything but Sunday roast with proper British potatoes (that they bought from Aldi)… they seem to have a lot of less than obvious complaints.
Where could they go that is better? Lots of nice places abroad if you have money, but lot sof nice places in the UK if you have money.
Have you lived in a former industrial town outside London? I have.
Focusing on people there also breaks the tie to Brexit you mentioned earlier. These are the places where people voted for Brexit. its mostly people in the south who say they want to go abroad because of Brexit, especially affluent people who could if they would.
> Except, that is, from the older folk in those post-industrial towns, who don’t want to go anywhere they might have to speak foreign or eat anything but Sunday roast with proper British potatoes (that they bought from Aldi)
A rather bigoted view of people. I live in (an admittedly fairly prosperous) northern formerly industrial town and its friendly, has a (rather boring) Indian restaurant down the road. "Chinese chippies" are a long standing institution throughout the north west....
"In 2022, almost 73,000 former students were issued a Graduate Visa, which allows them to live and work in the UK for two years after graduation or three years for PhD graduates. Introduced in July 2021, the new route saw high take-up and led to a large increase in the number of students extending their stay in the UK.
The number of students extending their stay in the UK through the Graduate route reached a record level in 2022 and continued to increase in 2023. In the year ending 30 September 2023, around 105,000 Graduate visas were granted to main applicants"
>>I had to apply for a graduate degree
Thanks for your anecdote. The International Students come in via foundation years not available to local students. More money for the uni, and the international students get in with lower grades.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/cash-for-courses-the-for...
And what's wrong with that? These aren't overstays, they're people who've been granted visas in a perfectly above board manner.
73,000 want to, at least for two years.
All of these 'students' are now illegally in these countries, and realistically most will not be caught and deported. Perhaps the worst part is that even at the scale of this fraud, it pales in comparison to the mind-boggling number of students being legally permitted entry to these countries, most of them from India.
The expectations from the Home Office for Level 4 Visas are quite well documented and have very specific conditions that education providers must show to satisfy, e.g. the students who hold these Visas attend all their classes. A provider (University) can have their ability to sponsor Visas removed if their compliance isn't adequate.
Part of the reasons Universities in the UK record attendance at all is because of the compliance regime from the Home Office. The story therefore is that these universities are inadequately complying.
There’s a big money in this which cash strapped universities are naturally going to take advantage of.
Employers in India, an example because I know this, don’t care much someone has a degree from UK university even if it’s a prestigious one.
The single biggest factor for an Indian student to go for a graduate degree in developed country is emigration.
It's mostly a money thing: universities are forced to charge below cost (on average) to residents for degrees, so they try to attract international students which they can charge much more for. While some might want to immigrate, plenty more go back home afterwards (The UK has a lot of international prestige for education, so it's extremely common for rich families to send their kids to the UK, including boarding schools below the university level)
The real weakness is lack of recording when you leave the UK. The last time I went abroad there seemed to be no identity check: passports were only checked on entry.
On the other hand it is impossible to get a job or rent decent accommodation without the right visas. It does not matter to illegal immigrants who work illegally for below minimum wage and sleep several to a room rented from a slum landlord, but I cannot see the sort of people who can afford overseas fees doing that.
There are also consequences. I know someone who overstayed by a fairly short time (more due to being disorganised than anything else) who ended up unable to get a visa again for years.
I do know someone who wrote a book (The Professional, by Ashok Ferry) that I think is fairly realistic about the desperate measures people can take to stay in the country, but it was unusual back then for people from affluent backgrounds to do that, and would be even more so now.
https://news.sky.com/story/i-had-no-idea-how-life-would-be-i...
But with very strict legal checks when starting employment and renting property this pushes you outside of reputable employers and landlords... So not so easy if you don't intend to scrape a living by sub-letting an Uber Eats/Deliveroo delivery driver account...
It will be a hard reckoning.
From TFA:
> Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, rejects the suggestion some overseas students are being allowed on courses with poor English language skills as a way of boosting income.
"Students will need to be able to afford the fee to study in the UK, but beyond that it’s a question of taking students who apply, and applying a merit-based criteria," [chief executive] says. "It is absolutely central that this is a system that people trust."
(And yeah, the fixed prices for a degree in the UK for UK residents results in all kinds of strange flows. Not only are international degrees subsidizing everything else, humanities and mathematics, being generally much cheaper to teach, wind up subsidizing the science, engineering, and especially medical degrees)
Universities were never "privatized". They were always private institutions that (mostly) get public funding (including subsidies for charging British students lower fees). They are all AFAIK non-profits (as are almost all independent schools, which historically also got government funding in the form of fees paid for some students - some still do, although it tends to be for profit ones that do so these days as far as I can tell).
What has happened is a loss of ethos and a cultural shift to running universities more like businesses. As you say, the focus is on the financial reports.
This will inevitably lead to a loss of reputation of British universities, but as you say, so one cares. By the time it causes the damage someone else will be in charge. its very like banks taking stupid risks before the financial crisis: as long as you are out of it by the time things go wrong, who cares?
In graduate school--where everybody already had at least an undergraduate degree--one of my professors finally got so frustrated she paused the course for three weeks to teach the class how to write a 5-paragraph essay, with introduction, three points, and a conclusion. Many students were surprised that this also helped them understand the structure of articles they were reading.
I have distinct and clear memories of the day in 5th grade when the middle school language arts teacher came to our class and spent an afternoon teaching this topic. She said we would never make it through middle school without it. We were 10 years old. It took hours, not weeks.
I don't doubt the problem is even worse among people who have not grown up with the language, but I've met plenty of people who were very technically proficient in their field and had a lot to contribute, though they needed translators, and way too many people who had nothing to contribute who had spoken English from early childhood.
Our teachers in school went through massive amounts of grammar rules, literature and poems. They never taught us how to write in a simple structured way.
Only when I studied for the GRE did the learning material really break down the process into simple steps.
I think it's kind of a problem that some teachers can't or won't touch these basic topics, maybe assuming other teachers already did.
After that you can teach grammar and then art...
We had a lot of old teachers that were sick a lot. I think the substitute teachers didn't always follow up on all the planned lessons.
In chemistry we had a substitute teacher the whole year in 10th grade. In 11th grade our new teacher noticed we were missing some fundamentals. Turns out we weren't taught any of the 10th grade material. She then did a 3 month crash course on 10th grade material.
With the right foundation it was really easy afterwards.
Having done some Math and Physics tutoring, I never tutored a kid that really _couldn't_ do math or physics. It was almost always that they lacked some fundamentals and thus couldn't learn any of the advanced material, because they lacked a mental model to grok the information.
At least this has been my case as a non-native English speaker. I usually feel awkward in a conversation among native speakers. I can't always "get" their humour and cultural references and sometimes I need longer pauses to find the most appropriate next word. This makes me feel uncomfortable and turns me into a passive listener.
When writing text however, these pauses are not visible and I tend to write only the stuff that has informational value, without all the wordplay and wittiness.
I was lucky to have a good teacher in high school teaching the basics of writing properly (in Dutch). I paid attention and figured out pretty quickly that writing follows rules and that anything you do structurally wrong you can learn to do structurally right. Later when doing my Ph. D., I had to learn to write in English. Same thing. Same rules. Different grammar and vocabulary. And a bit more scrutiny from your peers who will tell you when you are being incoherent, waffling, etc.
There are those who can converse with incomplete information, building off the emotional content of the conversation, and those who can only deal with specifics and abhor any uncertainty or generalisation.
I guess what I'm saying is, we all put our minds to work in different ways and are all experts in our own particular niches.
Those who can communicate their ideas better tend to be branded more intelligent, whereas those who can put their mind directly to action with little outside input might not be seen so favourably.
The students never turn up to courses and go to live with relatives in cities miles away.
The bloated UK university sector (your experience of a UK university, if you have it, is not typical of the vast shadow educational establishment which rakes in billions per year and delivers almost nothing in return) obviously has no interest in stopping this.
This has been spoken about for years now among people who work or have worked in these third-rate unis. As immigration filters up the political agenda I expect we'll start to see a mass decimation of these pseudo-educational establishments.
I live in a city that has a huge number Chinese students, who I regularly see coming and going from the campuses. Not all top universities, either. It does seem to me like these foreign student communities can be overly insular but I've never seen any evidence that they're illegally overstaying at any scale. As they generally come from wealthy backgrounds and societies that heavily emphasise family values, I am skeptical that they'd get higher quality of life in the UK than their home countries.
free (long term) movement/immigration for the people to anywhere desirable is dead in the modern world, you generally need to pay (golden visas, "education") or be paid (work visas).
If you've ever applied for a job in the UK, you'll know that companies take their right to work compliance obligations very seriously.
Most students now come from India, and the fastest growing regions sending students are now South Asia and Africa:
On the other hand, nobody anti-immigration ever cares about facts or how the system actually works.
While this might be a great networking experience for them, it was far from what I was looking for. It made me realise that spending over £35k on a postgraduate degree feels less like an investment in education and more like buying your way into a profession.
That said, I’m still on the lookout for a good postgraduate program, especially something in artificial intelligence or business for people with technical backgrounds. If you’ve got any recommendations, let me know.
The schedule was to have one module per week, 9-5 from Monday to Friday, and then you're on your own! And it wasn't even continuous; there was a gap of a few weeks between some of them. There were some "Language Support" groups where they started by saying, "We are not paid to do this. We are volunteering," which translates to "do not have any sort of expectation of help."
I then started asking questions to see if I had higher expectations or the this is the norm. The answer was, there are "red bricks" universities which might have what I have expected, but the rest are just commercial shops with no academic goals.
Postgraduate degrees in particular are rife with cheating, collusion, and „students” mainly in pursuit of a visa than an education.
My partner attended the RCA recently. I'm their cohort of around 80 students, 60 of them were from China, and around 80 percent of whom had English so poor you couldn't hold a conversation. I don't mean to be rude it is true.
During safety briefing they'd, say, walk down a hall, then lecturer would say "turn right" and they'd turn left.
The remaining 20 were also international but had decent English.
Doesn't matter though because the only "teaching" that happens is lectures throughout the term. If you can whip out a good final assessment you get the degree all the same.
The latest elections swung university policy from "do them all in English to promote international exchanges" to "revert to Dutch and make our language great again". Some 20-30% of foreign students stay in the country and the tax income they generate easily outweighs the limited subsidies they receive compared to Dutch students (or so a study said that I read some years ago, iirc it concluded we can give them the same level of subsidies no problem), plus of course the international contacts and culture exchange it promotes. The number of students that won't come to NL because they can't participate anymore (let's be real, who's going to learn this niche language in high school to the point where they can fluently work with it in classes and exams?) seems like a downturn in every way, including that our own students will be worse at using English (you learn a language by using it, not just from textbooks)
I know from experience that the teachers, native students, and foreign students, all don't speak perfect English, but at least for the one I did there was an in-person intake test and, in class, it wasn't a real barrier
As for the fraud that's mentioned in the article, where you pay someone else do do your coursework, that problem exists also outside of students that struggle with the language
The last is because the problem is not that they do not have "perfect" English, but that they have English that is just not good enough to let them study in English.
There are other issues. For example a lecturer teaching a course on modern slavery at University College London was removed from the course that she designed, because she had upset Chinese students by giving Chinese examples for slavery. Cultural exchange is good, but this is not a healthy version of it.
Chinese students also do not usually do not mix with others so that does not encourage cultural exchange.
> [which] is because the problem is [...] they have English that is just not good enough to let them study in English.
Is the cheating due to this language gap, though, or would they have cheated anyway? Evidently they have the money to travel to and live in the UK, spend tens of thousands of pounds on tuition, and pay others to do their assignments. I don't know that the group of "students" taking this approach is there for the knowledge in the first place, foreign or not
That said, I'm open to the problems being different from the sudden focus on the natives' language in the Netherlands, I'm just not sure what to think when the article cites mere anecdotes (of opposing statements at that) and the argument fits great with the recent shift in voting behaviour. The article could be correct in the point it's trying to make, it's just that it's not supported or rejected by the evidence presented and both sides have ulterior motives readily available (tuition money vs. anti-foreigner rhetoric)
A bit of both, most likely. If their English is not good enough to study in then they have to cheat or fail, so they should never have been admitted. Obviously cheating needs to be stopped in general, but this group of students gives universities an incentive to turn a blind eye to it.
> I'm just not sure what to think when the article cites mere anecdotes (of opposing statements at that)
That is the state of journalism. Lots of BBC stories are like that.
> and the argument fits great with the recent shift in voting behaviour.
If you mean the shift of traditional Labour areas to Conservative and vice-versa that has been happening for a long time, its just reached the point where seats start shifting in our first past the post system in recent elections. In general Labour voters have lost working class votes, and gained more affluent voters. There have been other interesting movements such as Catholics switching from Labour to Conservative, as have ethnic minorities.
If you mean the performance of Reform in the last election I think that is largely because of the deep unpopularity of the last Conservative government, and the perception that Labour are no different (which the new government seems determined to prove true). While Reform is an anti-immigrant party, I do not think most of their voters are. My experience (as ethnic minority British) is that the UK is a lot less racist than it was in the 1980s - my lifetime as seen a pretty much continual decline of racism.
The issue isn't just that they dont speak English, but its highlighting the trend of just buying your degree and thus taking up the position that someone who is in a position to actually learn would be in.
You don't need to pay to a university degree course to learn English. In fact there are other dedicated courses you CAN take to learn English. As per the article :
> Most students paid other people to do their coursework, she explains, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.
In the UK there might not be a slot for the person to actually learn without the international student: they effectively subsidize residents.
the universities are swimming in money, it's not an actual subsidy and in my experience ends up just crowding out native students
Everything thinks of Oxbridge (which are not representative of most universities) as being really rich, but even then it's maybe a few of the colleges that spend a lot of their money propping up the rest of them (the average oxbridge college has some very old and very expensive to maintain buildings and more or less has to beg alumni for that money).
Is it also bad that a masters program might expect knowledge of the subject?
Some UK masters courses are only 12 months, so they're intensively taught. By the time you've learned English by immersion, you've already fallen behind.
That means either you spend a lot of money and fail; or you cheat; or the university drops their standards a lot.
And none of them are an outcome we’re happy with.
> "How is it possible to continue this coursework without understanding a British accent or English properly?" she tells BBC File on 4.
> Most students paid other people to do their coursework, she explains, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.
Because they aren't taking English courses, these are Masters.
At least read the article, it's in the first paragraph.
I started losing interest there. Nobody wants police-style schooling, but if a university allows students to graduate who have cheated on all of their coursework (and presumably on the exams), then it's not really a "selling prestige" problem, it's more of a "this university is a joke" problem.
This is not a matter of prejudice but basic competence.
You don't need to be immersed in order to be fluent. I spoke English fluently years before ever coming to an English speaking country.
But that is, to me, one of)the points of this story. The constant dumbing down of everything under the sun in our society. You could demand that someone has to do their homework and learn to speak English, but instead we accept that the only way to do it is just by hanging around and acquire effortlessly it via osmosis. Why? Why is it acceptable that people don't have to make an effort?
My prejudice isn't against people who don't speak English fluently. It's against lazy people. Someone might be hard working and disciplined and just have no interest in moving abroad or learning English - there's nothing wrong with that.
For research, and for taking UK students. NOT for taking overseas students.
Universities are private institutions that get paid by the state to do specific things. A few do opt out of this.
At least that's how it works in the Netherlands where I've looked into it, and that's with subdidies available for EU students who often don't stay here and don't contribute to taxes later. Source, in Dutch but the graphic near the top is a good summary, where the lower bars are "costs" (kosten) and the higher bars "benefits" (baten): https://www.cpb.nl/de-economische-effecten-van-international...
Rich kids who can't speak English seem to have no trouble buying their degree.
I always stand very far from conspiracy theories and just think that, like living organisms, organisations tend to turn into sentient organisms that just strive to stay alive driven by survival instinct.
That’s the only way I can explain how a handful of people I know get paid to publish papers of no value, who are not going to be read by anybody outside of their tight circle, and they don’t even care about (I hear a lot of “that’s the bullsh#t we gotta do to get paid”s). Most unis where I live behave just like parasite organisms living on top of a host that they try to get the most out of, economically speaking.
The fact that the threshold of decency drops below any reasonable level is just a byproduct of the hosts requiring unis to adapt to their requests (political hires, needlessly overinclusive politics, bar-lowering acceptance criteria), and at this point I don’t expects universities to stand on any ground whatsoever in the name of protecting culture and education.
2. While they may have weak english skills, their is no assertion that they aren’t intelligent.
> She [Yasmin] later found out that of the 100 students on most of her modules, "maybe 80 or 90 of them bought assignments" from so-called "essay mills" based overseas.
> He [A Russell Group university professor] tells File on 4 that 70% of his students at master’s degree level over the past five years did not have sufficient English language skills to be on the course
Come on BBC, you are writing an entire story based on random people's very questionable estimates? "Maybe 80 or 90", "sufficient English language skills", without concrete data or more precise definition of what constitutes "sufficient".
https://www.smh.com.au/national/cheating-is-now-so-rampant-t...