It is perverse that institutions can have an incentive to prefer foreign students over British
As this newspaper reports today, Whitehall mandarins are fearful of a revolt among middle-class parents, as their children face being squeezed out of top degree places by universities that are incentivised to admit more foreign students instead. This crisis is the latest product of a dysfunctional system, made worse by piecemeal reform and top-down social engineering.
The mess engulfing higher education has been a long time coming. It springs in part from a failure, over many decades, to develop proper vocational pathways for Britain’s school-leavers. That was compounded by the naive New Labour commitment that half of young people should go to university, without considering the value or quality of the courses they would take. Today, too many degrees fail to lead to improved career prospects for young people – who then never pay off their student loans. But the universities face few, if any, negative consequences for this: they bank the income from fees, while the taxpayer will be left to pick up the bill over the years ahead.
The system has also become corrupted by misguided attempts at social engineering, including the introduction in some cases of quasi-quotas that penalise applicants from private schools. Intellectual and political diversity has been allowed to wither, with liberal-Left opinions dominating among academics. Conservatives are fighting against a rising tide of intolerance in institutions that ought to be at the vanguard of protecting free thought and inquiry.
To some extent, the growth in the number of foreign students at British universities reflects the strength of the education on offer, at least in those that remain world-class. But it is also perverse that they can have a financial incentive to enrol non-British students because of the difference in the fees they are able to charge. Low-quality universities have been accused of becoming little more than visa factories, allowing many thousands of people to come to the UK, with not much obvious benefit to the country at large.