A small cost
It looks like the Tory government’s war on immigration is going to have one giant success, it is forcing down the number of people from abroad who are applying to study at British universities.
Amazing what you can achieve with a misdirected, cynical, desperate pre-election policy designed to placate the tattooed rioters who you are desperate to win back from Reform.
The damage caused is not limited to the scum who have emerged to try to murder children but in a weaker poorer higher education system. Most British universities only keep their head aboce water by charging foreign students far more than they do British ones.
Also the UK has for generations educated whole swathes of foreign born students, giving them excellent and world respected qualifications, a command of english and hopefully created generation after generation of life long anglophiles.
Still the immigration figures are down. So that is nice.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
It’s hard to feel sympathy for the University sector. They were given a huge opportunity by Blair to establish the UK as the global hub of educational excellence, and instead every one of them (all charities, remember) put large resources into non-substantive humanities subjects and overfilled them with students who were not prepped for tertiary education or what is expected of them, while actively pursuing students from outside the EU (the financially lucrative ones) to fill their STEM programs.
So they took the profits and educated everyone else’s students to a world class level, and cashed in the subsidies to turn out a generation of over qualified (yet arguably under educated) young people with elevated expectations of their employment value into the UK’s workforce.
All the while the institutions built up vast property portfolios, but utterly hollowed out career stability within their own sector, so academics and professors, who couldn’t rely on getting tenure anywhere, and often living in precarious financial circumstances, would dilute the quality of science by following the market for getting published in journals, such as engaging in quid pro quo agreements with others within the peer review process to assist each other’s publications (‘you say mine is sound science, and I’ll say yours is’).
And amidst all this, the old guard couldn’t be seen to be equal in status as the former polytechnics, so they got together and conspired to invent the Russell Group, and set about convincing the nation that the group has been around for centuries as a casque mark of intellectual quality, rather than a self-selected group of over-indulged ancient institutions who want to maintain their exclusionary practices with their student intake and their privileged access for their graduates, and founded in 2007.
i have never understood why Theresa May added international students to immigration figures, when they mostly return to their home countries. Could it possibly be to claim that immigration has gone down, although she probably didn't anticipate the latest changes to the rules?