Regarding the potential lowering of standards for widening participation purposes, this doesn't change the fact that the entry standards for Oxford and Cambridge are still higher than LSE and St. Andrews.
But you don't get anywhere near as much online outrage with that theory so "leftists are ruining western civilisation" wins out again.
Some universities are better at optimising for rankings, see also REF research funding and how much effort and resources are spent on it, which varies by university: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/
but on the other end our political class fail to understand/sell that stopping international students means that we have to fund university education.
The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government and university administrators it just seemed unlimited because there are no limits to resources, dangerous).
The quality of teaching is non-existent. It's about giving foreign parents ability to tell their peers look my brilliant child is studying in England! But really they are not studying. Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.
Domestic students end up with debt for degrees that deliver little value, often taught by underqualified lecturers. Those who complain get brushed off or quietly bought out with NDA-style settlements. Foreign students mostly keep quiet because openly questioning standards would devalue their own diploma.
So yes, funding cuts mattered - but the bigger scandal is how universities responded. They saw the “golden years” were over and decided to milk the brand, not safeguard education.
They are basically a scam.
The amount of cheating on exams and complete lack of effort on studying by the vast majority (+80%) was astounding. We were essentially hand feeding them to get them to learn the material.
The professor was very frustrated but (I presume) was told you can’t come down hard on them. They were obviously a huge income source for the university.
Reason #53 why modern university has basically become a scam.
Formal tracking of attendance at lectures is a fairly new thing in British universities (introduced around 2015 when I was teaching at one).
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2015/oct/ucl-international-studen...
Combined with universities' increasing reliance on international student income (over the last years) and issues accessing research funding, this can get universities into trouble.
[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
They do show drops in the last year or two, but I find it hard to attribute that to Brexit when they're still much higher.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/293277/study-related-vis...
What happened was a massive expansion to non-EU students paying the larger uncapped fees because of an expansion of student visas to allow (a) dependents to come (b) a route to staying in the UK. It led to over a million immigrants in one year, was massively criticised politically, and so got scrapped. There's no a lot of arguing that we should as a country remove/change the Indefinite Leave to Remain route because those graduates (and dependents) are from January starting to be eligible to apply and stay permanently.
So a good UK university cannot profitably offer education for UK students.
So for some of the best they'll focus on non UK students. These students aren't subject to a capped price we can't afford, so we can gouge them to make up for the lost revenue from home students.
But the usual "I'm not racist but..." people of course hate foreigners. How dare any of these people be different in any way. And so while some of them will pretend their hatred only extends to some foreigners it's always the same exact people who are aggrieved and want yet another excuse to hate foreigners.
This results in government efforts to make it harder to study here, and more expensive to teach students here. That way they slightly appease racists who weren't going to vote for them anyway and they feel justified.
I assume eventually this will collapse, and judging from Brexit nothing whatsoever will be learned by the supporter/victim class, the same gullible morons will keep falling for lies from the same people who feed off them. Certain that somehow it must be somebody else's fault their lives are shit while the leaders they're feeding are doing so well.
I find the rates high for what some (most?) students are getting.
Much of this data is extremely 'gameable', and a lot of the 'alpha' between successful and less successful institutions is being 'good at surveys.' e.g. for NSS, between comparable institutions it's really a question of how good they are at getting students to complete the survey (students mostly ignore it, and you lose marks for poor completion rates).
Of course — it should also go without saying that there is no 'correct' weighting for any of this data, and depending on how you weight the different indicators, the rankings change.
I can’t see a single example of anyone reacting to it that way.