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A sharp rise in international students who pay higher tuition fees at top English universities is squeezing the number of places for UK students, according to data analysis by the Financial Times.
The crunch in places at the research-intensive Russell Group of universities — including Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol and the London School of Economics — shows the severity of the funding crisis in higher education.
Education experts warned of a looming political row as it became apparent that the big increase in the share of places offered to international students was starting to affect the chances of British children attending the highest-ranked universities.
More than a quarter of places at English Russell Group universities went to international students last year — up from 16 per cent between 2012 and 2017 — according to data compiled by the consultancy dataHE for the FT.
“The brewing scandal which will flare up this summer or next is Brits being squeezed out of Russell Group universities,” said Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute. “Every time they take a foreign undergraduate there’s one less place for Brits.”
Overseas students can pay up to £50,000 more for their places than home students, whose fees are capped at £9,250 a year.
The intake of lower-paying domestic students at English Russell Group universities fell to the lowest level since 2014 last year, with 86,000 domestic students admitted, down from 102,000 in 2020.
Most EU students were moved on to higher international fees in 2021, due to Brexit, which also marginally contributed to the decline in the number of people paying domestic fees.
The universities argue that increasing their overseas intake over the past decade has enabled them to fund tens of thousands more places, benefiting students at home and abroad, even as the real value of domestic tuition fees has fallen by a third since 2012.
Pressure on places is set to increase yet further as the UK experiences a “demographic bulge” of 18-year-olds, that will require UK universities to find an extra 45,000 places in 2030 to maintain the current proportion of school leavers going to university.
With no major increase in government funding or tuition fees expected, many fear that England’s most prestigious universities will have no choice but to give an even greater share of their places to lucrative overseas students in the coming years.
When students receive their A-level results and university offers next month, it will become clear whether the trend has continued this year.
Mark Corver, managing director of dataHE, agreed that universities are “desperately struggling” to maintain average funding per student since the recent spike in inflation has sharply eroded the value of domestic fees.
“This is the first time universities are being forced to make these differential recruitment choices just by the economic realities of dwindling real fee values,” he said, referring to data from 2022.
Corver said that to fully offset the effects of inflation during the past 12 months — which has reduced the real-term value of tuition fees from £9,250 to the equivalent of £6,000 — selective universities would need to increase their international student intake to 30 per cent.
Tim Bradshaw, chief executive of the Russell Group, said the revenue generated by international students was being reinvested in education and research.
However, he conceded that revenue from overseas students is now being used to cover “growing deficits in both domestic teaching and publicly funded research” and warned that if nothing shifts, universities’ ability to mitigate the impact on quality and choice for students would be limited.
The Department for Education said that domestic students “continue to make up the vast majority of students within our universities” and noted that the government will provide £750mn in extra funding to higher education institutions over the next three years.
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