Education
Foreign students
Rhodes Boyson
As we sell Britain into pawn by huge overseas borrowings we also pretend that we have the resources of our Victorian ancestors by giving away some £450,000,000 a year in overseas aid. It is a Gilbert and Sullivan situation. Similarly in education we fill the vacancies in our universities, polytechnics and further education colleges by large numbers of overseas students at the expense of the down-trodden British taxpayer.
Education has recently been a growth industry; schools and colleges fill and expand so that their staffs can be increased and promoted. The only achievement of some sixth-formers is to increase the salary of their headmaster and staff. Similarly few colleges or universities wish to contract in the face of declining home demand, so they fill up with foreign students.
In our universities there are 10,000 science vacancies and our polytechnics in engineering, technical studies and science are 20 per cent empty. Almost half the 360 courses in England and Wales for the Higher National Diploma course are unable to recruit twenty students a year. Yet this slack is not used to allow rationalisation of courses and sensible accounting. Numbers are kept up and home students with 'A' levels as low as two 'E's are recruited while 300 academic posts in universities are left vacant to make temporary savings. In rapidly increasing numbers, however, foreign students are recruited.
The fee for foreign students has recently been increased to £200 a year for a non-advanced course and £320 for an advanced course. Yet a year at a polytechnic was estimated by the Department of Education and Science two years ago to cost £1,275, without any allowance for capital cost, and a course in a further education college was estimated to cost £900 on the same basis. Some post-graduate courses can cost up to £4,000-£5,000 a year.
The percentage of foreign students can rise to 76.6 per cent in one London college and even reaches 75 per cent on postgraduate civil engineering courses at the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. One in four students at London colleges are foreign. The total national figure is 95,000 foreign students on college, polytechnic and university courses and this is an underestimate for two reasons. Many foreign students spend a minimum of three years on feeder courses so that they count as home students (and even receive a grant) when they do university or postgraduate work and there is no record of the number of foreign students on part-time courses since they count on these as home students!
The countries from which most students come are Malaysia, Iran, France and the US. Thus the argument cannot even be made that we are concentrating on helping the underdeveloped countries. One quarter come on scholarships and the rest are covered from family resources.
With the lack of i:easoning of the present time there is one further injustice. The Labour Government may decide to pay for the 2,000 Black Rhodesian students who slipped in illicitly this year, yet the Ugandan refugees for whom we are responsible are treated in Brent and some other boroughs as foreign students. These young people, settled permanently here and accepted. by the previous Conservative Government, have to pay foreign fees and receive no grants.
It is all a piece of our muddled miserable thinking. When the universities are having financial cut-backs the whole question of higher education numbers and home and foreign students should be reviewed. Robert Hunter, the able Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Birmingham, recently said that to keep universities adequately maintained on the block grant principle the closure of some universities might be necessary. Why not begin a return to sanity by offering a number of scholarships to able foreign students while insisting that all other foreign students should pay an economic fee (including the covering of capital costs)?
If the recommendations of ILEA's standing advisory committee on further education — against any increase in the admission of foreign students and in favour of new courses specially for such students — is implemented then it could be the beginning of a return to sanity.
We must remember, however, that under the present egalitarian socialist government all our universities are full of potential foreign students since very many of the Britishers who obtain degrees which are marketable abroad in medicine, science and engineering will flee our socialist drabness at the first opportunity. It is a sad thought.
Previous page
