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Comment by fatfox | Hacker News Reader

Yes I’d agree with that. International student income dropped, rounds of layoffs.

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/

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How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?

I’m not sure where you’ve got the stats from, but student visas granted dropped since 2022, acc to UK gov (-5% in 2023, -14% in 2024).[0]

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-...

Here's one source, I checked a couple, the numbers varied between sources curiously but they seemed reasonably consistent.

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...

Research funding isn't a cash cow to keep universities financially viable, it should be used for genuine research. It all to often is not.

Because universities borrowed staggering amounts of money and hired massive numbers of people.

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).

Don't forget that the Universities focused on getting foreign students and cashing in instead of providing valuable education.

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.

I TA’ed a course at my state university a few years back. We had some program that attracted hundreds of students from the UAE. Many were obviously from wealthy families and drove Mercedes and BMWs, etc.

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.

I’ve seen lots of variations on this. Community colleges seem to have gotten in on it in a big way.

This is such garbage. The only reason universities focused on getting foreign students is because the introduction of fees that don't increase with inflation means they are all slowly going bankrupt.

The funding squeeze is real, but that’s not the whole story. Universities didn’t have to turn into diploma/visa mills - they chose to. Instead of protecting standards, they pivoted to a business model of brand-selling: recruiting overseas students at inflated rates and cutting corners on teaching.

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.

> Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.

Formal tracking of attendance at lectures is a fairly new thing in British universities (introduced around 2015 when I was teaching at one).

Actually, the Home Office / UKVI does require universities sponsoring international students to monitor attendance and engagement, and to report non-attendance. This has prompted many universities to formalise attendance tracking (barcode check-ins, attendance apps etc.), especially for visa-holding students. Whether they actually do it, is another question.

Yes, but it is not till quite recently that this implied formal attendance tracking of student attendance at individual lectures. For example, here is how UCL interpreted the requirements as recently as 2015:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2015/oct/ucl-international-studen...

Its a double whammy of EU students suddenly have to pay a lot more cash for a lot less certainty

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 big fall in income is nothing to do with Brexit, and it's worth saying that international students from within the EU paid the same as home students pre-Brexit.

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.

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