From my direct experience, even the Russel group universities are in a dire financial situation. At least that's the top down message, again being positive in cash for many years and owning property to me would be a good position but I have first hand knowledge of Russel group universities cutting staff/roles/courses and going after the foreign students as much as they can.

Some of this is their own making - for example the 'highly respected' universities not doing clearing so when their intake is lower than expected they don't top that up with 2nd choices.

Schools are now competing within universities to win student retention so their numbers don't look as bad / to help protect their budgets from being slashed further.

> pretty much all of our "traditional" universities are absolutely capable of standing on their feet without international students

This is simply not true. At least not currently possible. If the UK made the _strategic decision_ then I don't see why we couldn't, but currently if all foreign students boycott'd the UK then the majority of our universities would be bankrupt. (Again, in the way they are currently managed: they could sell property etc. but that's never considered.)

I dont have the data, but Oxford Brookes is actually an exception and I don't think the only one. It's awash with money because of the sheer volume of domestic wealthy attendees with various donations to various causes. Sheffield Hallam and most of the other polys aren't usually in quite the same position and your point stands.

The admin staff are very much underpaid in comparison to academic staff, and it would be impossible for the academic staff to manage without the admin staff. Also, there is fairly little admin staff at the school level compared to academic staff. When you get to "central" staff, then yes it's pretty much 100% admin/directors/c-level/etc. staff and I don't know what they do that's not being done by the hard worked school staff.

Indeed, all info is good as long as you check the intended/implicit bias if nothing else it's indicative of what they want you to think about something.

For me I draw the line at military systems (though given the type of programming I do not really relevant) and gambling systems (which actually has come up before and was a lot more money but I decided that me looking in the mirror and liking the person looking back mattered more) - I don't presume to judge other people for it though, it's my personal choice.

I disagree. Oxbridge, LSE, Edinburgh, etc appear equally as susceptible. In fact in top London universities it seems to be worse - prestige attracts more international students.

I also agree in the sense that there are less prestigious universities that appear to operate as if they are almost Chinese/in China.

Both are major concerns I would have thought.

Yeah it's just funny that its more akin to a sector in the tourism industry than academic or research. There are obviously pockets of world-class research and brilliant academics but the pressures in the opposite direction are pretty insane due to the business incentives.

I had received a video call request from a German asst prof after I had applied for CS MS and a full scholarship to his department. I had written back saying I'd be okay with that and had asked whether he could tell me what it was about. He was upfront: "English proficiency satisfaction call" (yup, verbatim). 2-3 minutes into the call, he chuckled and said, "okay okay I am satisfied with your English". He was from Eastern Europe, and English wasn't his strongest suit, and he had to ask for meanings a few times. I am from an ex-GB colony. Anyway he mentioned that his department (and no other department there) faced a lot of situations from this part of the world where applicants had perfect GRE and TOEFL/IELTS scores but in reality they struggled with communication, and with laughter he added, "and your score had a big red flag". Mine were not perfect; just that my TOEFL and GRE verbal scores were at odds.

20 years ago, my engineering school accepted a Chinese student directly in 2nd year due to their home university results. Middle of the year he was offered to either go back to 1st year and use the next 6 months to learn passable French or get the fuck out.

No idea if it is still the way to handle foreign students nowadays tho. But I think that's how every school should handle foreign students: no special passes, asked to learn the language to integrate.

This summary of the US logic for top tier schools is totally inaccurate, by the way.

The very best schools in the US: to choose a relatively uncontroversial list, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale -- all have need blind admissions, meaning they assess your ability to come whether or not you need financial aid. At least some (like Harvard) have sliding tuition scales that make the school totally free if family income is under $100k a year, or room and board only for family income under $200k a year, with some support continuing for families that make more than 200k.

Students want to go to these schools because they offer class mobility in the states alongside the excellent education.

Additionally you have to go well down the list of top tier universities and colleges in America before you get to one that spends less than tuition on its students. Yale states they spend about $90k over tuition per undergraduate for instance.

France is the same, the better universities are all public. But I know that the government spent an average of 35,000 euros per students at top public engineering schools in the early 2000s, not sure nowadays, so they do have funds it's just that the way of bringing money depends on actually being great academically.

Universities and engineering schools (something very French, think STEM specific universities) are free or very low-cost in France. But only for French students, students from the European Union, a few partnerships, etc.

Chinese and Indian students and the children of African diplomats pay ‘international’ fees. This is an international, mobile clientele with considerable means who have a choice. This represents a significant source of income.

In addition, the percentage of foreign students is taken into account in many rankings, prestige, etc. Therefore, public universities are also affected by this phenomenon.

There have been "conversion course" MSc courses in UK universities for a long time - when I was doing a CS first degree the department ran one of these courses and, presumably to save money, the MSc folks would share some of our classes.

Usually they were completely lost but at the end of it they got a "better" degree than ours, which was annoying...

When I did CS at a UK university in the 1980s it was brutal - I was an idiot in my first year and had to retake maths 3 times meaning I slipped behind by a year. However, I eventually did learn my lesson(s) and did increasingly well over my second, third and fourth years - ending up with a 1st and being particularly fond (ironically) of the mathematical parts of the course.

We had quite a lot of foreign students on the course and they were all, without exception, completely awesome and great people to do a course with. Mind you, Norwegian moonshine is horrific...

Exactly. Also, the same push for profit made cohort sizes for many courses extremely large, simultaneously making the more interesting/required (or if you a slacker, easy) classes extremely difficult to get in (first-come-first-serve basis, you need to ensure you are the first in the online line to get your seat) and the class sizes are too large to make learning interactive.

Funnily enough, as a full-fee paying international student, I had an easier time learning in India than in the US a decade or so ago; the only thing that made my masters education worthwhile was the research opportunities, the general quality of students, and an easier job market (at that time). Given that all three are in decline right now, I would not advise anyone to pursue masters abroad.

Without knowing anything about your situation, this sounds like a bad idea. I think roughly you want a university that is well-regarded[1] and hard to get into so that one’s attendance carries some signal.

[1] by well-regarded, I mean well-regarded by eg people at competently run well-paying firms who do hiring, rather than eg people who are really into politics and who have idiosyncratic opinions about particular universities

I just want to add here - I personally feel like an entire generation of people got absolutely betrayed by the government and put into unpayable debt just to go into university and no one really cared. If this happened in France, Paris would be on fire(well, more so than it usually is).

And what I mean by this - when I finished uni I had £12k debt, which I paid off after about 10 years of working, and it was on about 1% interest that entire time. In contrast, my sister who finished university few years after me, has around £50k of student loan debt. And that loan is now on.....7% interest? It's insane. She is working full time and her payments are not even covering that interest, or barely cover it - she will never pay that loan off, it will eventually get written off. It's a constant 10% tax on all of her earnings, for 25 years(I think it's 30 now? or 35?) - except that this tax doesn't even go to the treasury.

These lot pay premium rent in places like Canary Wharf no problem. Basically stuff that >90% of the population could not afford.

Please name the country rather than just "Asia".

> Makes you wonder what the fuck is going on.

Last breaths of a dying empire. UK is trying to make a quick buck on its prestige before it's gone.

That only doesnt look crazy if youre used to American numbers. Anywhere else in the world thats crazy expensive.

If that doesn't seem crazy, then that shows just how insanely expensive college has become on average these days.

That’s like the average salary here.

My first job as a computer programmer after my CS degree paid £20k a year. If someone paid £35k/year to get that then I have a clown face emoji somewhere.

He’s right, at least for the US: since the economic crisis of 2007–2009, Americans had fewer children, and that “demographic cliff” is starting to hit colleges, as the total (not just the sufficiently educated) pool of eighteen year olds available for recruitment is shrinking and will shrink 15% over the next 15 years.

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cli...

Colleges in the US are panicking over enrollment.

Hitler was inspired by the US btw.

If you need to hide from China you're safe in a Western country. If you need to hide from America you need to go to Moscow.

Wonder how long it will take before the Chinese are powerful enough that they can launch missile strikes? Or put bombs in mobile phones?

The soft power aspect of this dependency is a problem, but the bigger problem is that it has made UK universities dependent on a fundamentally unsustainable revenue stream. Chinese students come to study in the UK because British universities are perceived as better than Chinese universities, and that reputation rubs off on the students' own prospects when they return home.

But, that effect can only really last a couple of generations at most: the students go home, a proportion of them become (well-trained) academics, and the Chinese universities that those academics work at become competitive with the foreign universities. A similar thing happened with the "plate glass" universities of the 1960s UK; initially those were bootstrapped with Oxbridge academics, but within 30 years they were standing on their own feet.

As far as I can see, current UK universities have no plan to replace the revenue that will be inevitably lost when the Chinese universities also begin to stand up on their own feet.

It's sort of the same problem from different perspectives. If the UK deemed it could affort higher education without Chinese money, the UK would by default stand up to China, because of the incentives you describe.

It is about Sheffield–Hallam university.

Signed off by Boris Johnson. No surprises there.