I never understood the prejudice against poor English speakers. How else are you supposed to learn a language than to be immersed in the culture before you are fluent?
> How else are you supposed to learn a language than to be immersed in the culture before you are fluent?
The issue isn't just that they dont speak English, but its highlighting the trend of just buying your degree and thus taking up the position that someone who is in a position to actually learn would be in.
You don't need to pay to a university degree course to learn English. In fact there are other dedicated courses you CAN take to learn English.
As per the article :
> Most students paid other people to do their coursework, she explains, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.
>The issue isn't just that they dont speak English, but its highlighting the trend of just buying your degree and thus taking up the position that someone who is in a position to actually learn would be in.
In the UK there might not be a slot for the person to actually learn without the international student: they effectively subsidize residents.
They're really not, especially not money without strings attached (there's a lot of money in research, and lot gets wasted, but that's partly because the broken process of grant funding means that you can't just take the money and spend it on useful things, you have to spend it on the grant even if it's not necessary). The fact is that home student tuition fees don't pay for the cost of teaching an average degree, and foreign student fees pay a fairly large multiple of that, so it's hard to see how that isn't effectively a subsidy, anyway, even if the universities have other income streams which also subsidize those degrees.
Everything thinks of Oxbridge (which are not representative of most universities) as being really rich, but even then it's maybe a few of the colleges that spend a lot of their money propping up the rest of them (the average oxbridge college has some very old and very expensive to maintain buildings and more or less has to beg alumni for that money).
Agreed it is the best way to learn, but I would say being dropped into (for example) a Maths degree and having to learn English at the same time isn't the best way to maximise the results of both.
The issue here is if your English skills aren’t strong enough to follow university level teaching.
Some UK masters courses are only 12 months, so they're intensively taught. By the time you've learned English by immersion, you've already fallen behind.
That means either you spend a lot of money and fail; or you cheat; or the university drops their standards a lot.
> Yasmin - not her real name - came from Iran to study for a master’s degree at a new university in the UK, but she was "shocked" to find many of her fellow students had limited English, and only one or two were British.
> "How is it possible to continue this coursework without understanding a British accent or English properly?" she tells BBC File on 4.
> Most students paid other people to do their coursework, she explains, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.
Because they aren't taking English courses, these are Masters.
At least read the article, it's in the first paragraph.
"Most students paid other people to do their coursework, [...]"
I started losing interest there. Nobody wants police-style schooling, but if a university allows students to graduate who have cheated on all of their coursework (and presumably on the exams), then it's not really a "selling prestige" problem, it's more of a "this university is a joke" problem.
With a dictionary. There is a theory that you need understand only 95% words of non-native language, also if the teacher knows about the language barrier he can try to be understandable with some special ways.
But some of them don't want even that. They want the prestige of a title, while staying in a group of peers from their country, there are whole little "italys" in universities. It sounds strange, as in why do you want to study, if you dont want your mind blown and your ideas challenged? The answer: status, expectations, get a high entry point into a career in a totalitarian system.
> I never understood the prejudice against poor English speakers. How else are you supposed to learn a language than to be immersed in the culture before you are fluent?
You don't need to be immersed in order to be fluent. I spoke English fluently years before ever coming to an English speaking country.
But that is, to me, one of)the points of this story. The constant dumbing down of everything under the sun in our society. You could demand that someone has to do their homework and learn to speak English, but instead we accept that the only way to do it is just by hanging around and acquire effortlessly it via osmosis. Why? Why is it acceptable that people don't have to make an effort?
My prejudice isn't against people who don't speak English fluently. It's against lazy people. Someone might be hard working and disciplined and just have no interest in moving abroad or learning English - there's nothing wrong with that.
It's not on the UK taxpayers dime, quite the opposite. The higher fees that international students pay are used to subsidise the costs of educating UK students.
UK Universities receive taxpayer funding and students also drive down the wages for the poorest in the UK which then makes them more dependent on welfare benefits, and they will likely contribute less in taxes than they cost the state as the vast majority of net taxes (taxes minus benefits) are paid by the rich.
According to the article, foreign students can be charged as much as the university wants. They're paying for it, bringing boatloads of money to the UK to rent, eat, study, and sometimes later work there
At least that's how it works in the Netherlands where I've looked into it, and that's with subdidies available for EU students who often don't stay here and don't contribute to taxes later. Source, in Dutch but the graphic near the top is a good summary, where the lower bars are "costs" (kosten) and the higher bars "benefits" (baten): https://www.cpb.nl/de-economische-effecten-van-international...
There's cheaper ways to learn English than to pay British tuition and live there. Judge my English level from this and previous comments; I haven't ever set foot in an English-speaking country. Probably 90% comes from media, chatting to teammates in videogames as a teenager, and being active on forums related to my field (also before I went to university). I bet you can also get a long way with free online courses if you want to get there faster than the passive learning by doing
This is an inevitable consequence of university privatization and the fees system: UK universities are dependent on overseas students to cross subsidize domestic students. The prestige of the degree is a valuable thing that can be sold. And since it's valuable, it's subject to being devalued by quietly substituting an inferior version.
The students get to go home to their own country with a prestigious UK degree, and the UK university gets to stay in business. The quality of the learning .. well, that's not in the financial reports, is it?
The subtext of the subtext you mention in your first assertion hinges on the assumption the UK is where these people eventually want to live, once they have that education. A significant number of the British don’t even want to live here, post Brexit, and neither do most of the international students I’ve met.
As for the second assertion, that’s just false. I had to apply for a graduate degree as an international student before my citizenship was awarded, the course requirements were explicitly identical, the only different was vastly higher fees and proof of both funding capacity and English language proficiency.
> A significant number of the British don’t even want to live here, post Brexit
Strangely few of them leave. There is a lot of "grass is greener" in British pessimism about their country.
> neither do most of the international students I’ve met
Most do not, but most never did. Most people prefer to live in their home country (especially if they are the sort that can afford overseas fees). That said they may want a degree that is recognised internationally (e.g. they get a cheaper degree that will be recognised in the US where salaries are much higher).
There are also a significant proportion who do want to stay. As someone with dual nationality the UK is my preferred place to live.
> Strangely few of them leave. There is a lot of "grass is greener" in British pessimism about their country.
Talk to your average kid stuck in 90% of the one-time industrial towns north of London and the grass isn’t just greener… the fact they’ll never be able to afford to go doesn’t mean they wouldn’t at the drop of a hat if they could.
> Most do not, but most never did
There’s no obviously valid complaint about those who come here, pay international fees, maybe work a few years while paying taxes and NHS premiums, then go elsewhere or home.
Come to think of it there’s very little obvious complaint about those who choose to come here legally, get an education at inflated cost to subsidize lower fees for the locals who tend not to avail themselves of them, then immigrate instead.
Except, that is, from the older folk in those post-industrial towns, who don’t want to go anywhere they might have to speak foreign or eat anything but Sunday roast with proper British potatoes (that they bought from Aldi)… they seem to have a lot of less than obvious complaints.
> Talk to your average kid stuck in 90% of the one-time industrial towns north of London and the grass isn’t just greener… the fact they’ll never be able to afford to go doesn’t mean they wouldn’t at the drop of a hat if they could.
Where could they go that is better? Lots of nice places abroad if you have money, but lot sof nice places in the UK if you have money.
Have you lived in a former industrial town outside London? I have.
Focusing on people there also breaks the tie to Brexit you mentioned earlier. These are the places where people voted for Brexit. its mostly people in the south who say they want to go abroad because of Brexit, especially affluent people who could if they would.
> Except, that is, from the older folk in those post-industrial towns, who don’t want to go anywhere they might have to speak foreign or eat anything but Sunday roast with proper British potatoes (that they bought from Aldi)
A rather bigoted view of people. I live in (an admittedly fairly prosperous) northern formerly industrial town and its friendly, has a (rather boring) Indian restaurant down the road. "Chinese chippies" are a long standing institution throughout the north west....
While the pessimism is true it's also the case that post-Brexit it is very hard for many of them to actually leave. The lack of free movement really made it hard for a lot of UK people to move to Europe.
>>the assumption the UK is where these people eventually want to live
"In 2022, almost 73,000 former students were issued a Graduate Visa, which allows them to live and work in the UK for two years after graduation or three years for PhD graduates. Introduced in July 2021, the new route saw high take-up and led to a large increase in the number of students extending their stay in the UK.
The number of students extending their stay in the UK through the Graduate route reached a record level in 2022 and continued to increase in 2023. In the year ending 30 September 2023, around 105,000 Graduate visas were granted to main applicants"
>>I had to apply for a graduate degree
Thanks for your anecdote. The International Students come in via foundation years not available to local students. More money for the uni, and the international students get in with lower grades.
It was in response to this up-thread: "your first assertion hinges on the assumption the UK is where these people eventually want to live, once they have that education"
Suppose I should have been clearer, perhaps that should have read “where these people eventually want to remain”, as in live for the rest of their lives, ie be immigrants instead of merely temporary expats (which should never bother a native, since they’re paying taxes during their working years without receiving benefits over their retirement years).
There are "colleges" that are literally just fronts for student visas. Canada just uncovered 10,000 fake student visas; the Australian government recently closed 150 colleges that don't even actually exist.
All of these 'students' are now illegally in these countries, and realistically most will not be caught and deported. Perhaps the worst part is that even at the scale of this fraud, it pales in comparison to the mind-boggling number of students being legally permitted entry to these countries, most of them from India.
Canada and Australia, obviously, have different compliance regimes.
The expectations from the Home Office for Level 4 Visas are quite well documented and have very specific conditions that education providers must show to satisfy, e.g. the students who hold these Visas attend all their classes. A provider (University) can have their ability to sponsor Visas removed if their compliance isn't adequate.
Part of the reasons Universities in the UK record attendance at all is because of the compliance regime from the Home Office. The story therefore is that these universities are inadequately complying.
Canada "uncovered" fake colleges and worker scams only after it became socially acceptable to question official immigration policies. Now that the Indian government is literally murdering Canadian citizens, it's a become a huge issue.
Student visas in the UK aren't indefinite: they do give you a foothold of sorts, but you can only stay for two years after graduation unless you move to some other visa (like a skilled worker visa sponsored by an employer, similar to H1B).
It's mostly a money thing: universities are forced to charge below cost (on average) to residents for degrees, so they try to attract international students which they can charge much more for. While some might want to immigrate, plenty more go back home afterwards (The UK has a lot of international prestige for education, so it's extremely common for rich families to send their kids to the UK, including boarding schools below the university level)
Given that the UK doesn't have any kind of compulsory identity card or requirement to register your residential address, once you've entered the country once it may be fairly straightforward to overstay.
The real weakness is lack of recording when you leave the UK. The last time I went abroad there seemed to be no identity check: passports were only checked on entry.
On the other hand it is impossible to get a job or rent decent accommodation without the right visas. It does not matter to illegal immigrants who work illegally for below minimum wage and sleep several to a room rented from a slum landlord, but I cannot see the sort of people who can afford overseas fees doing that.
There are also consequences. I know someone who overstayed by a fairly short time (more due to being disorganised than anything else) who ended up unable to get a visa again for years.
I do know someone who wrote a book (The Professional, by Ashok Ferry) that I think is fairly realistic about the desperate measures people can take to stay in the country, but it was unusual back then for people from affluent backgrounds to do that, and would be even more so now.
It's relatively easy to overstay, fairly difficult to live in the UK without a visa, since both landlords of rental properties and employers are supposed to check for them, and most of them do, so you wind up stuck in a pretty unstable position. For most graduates I'd imagine that's not particularly desirable. A quick search brought up an article which suggests that maybe ~7,000 people a year are overstaying their student visas (a high estimate, as that includes people who have left but the government didn't get a record of it), out of ~half a million granted a year, which is not exactly a huge influx compared the maybe ~50k a year who overstay a tourist visa instead, the ~15k a year who cross the channel on small boats, or the ~1 million a year moving into the UK legally.
It's easy to overstay in the sense that authorities won't directly come after you.
But with very strict legal checks when starting employment and renting property this pushes you outside of reputable employers and landlords... So not so easy if you don't intend to scrape a living by sub-letting an Uber Eats/Deliveroo delivery driver account...
By 5 years, I mean 3 years on your degree, and 2 years of a visa afterwards, so for three years you would be a student in student accommodation, and for the following 2 years you have a visa and so presumably can work and live somewhere legally.
I believe that the years of uni, i.e. living in the UK on a student visa, do not count towards the 5 years required to get indefinite leave to remain (permanent residence).
In many cases, the educational institution receiving a large population of foreign students is also an important regional employer that is severely underfunded. Without revenue from foreign students, such educational institutions may in fact face layoffs or closure.
It will be a hard reckoning.
From TFA:
> Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, rejects the suggestion some overseas students are being allowed on courses with poor English language skills as a way of boosting income.
"Students will need to be able to afford the fee to study in the UK, but beyond that it’s a question of taking students who apply, and applying a merit-based criteria," [chief executive] says. "It is absolutely central that this is a system that people trust."
Indeed, and I'd say that the quality of learning at the prestigious institutions is not much different from the less prestigious ones. Mostly their prestige is self-sustained through being selective amongst their applicants (and they are reasonably good at selecting for ability when they want to be). That does let them dump more work onto students and expect they'll keep up, but also it's quite hard to fail a UK university degree once you get into it, if you keep at it (generally they will try to find some way to award you a third).
(And yeah, the fixed prices for a degree in the UK for UK residents results in all kinds of strange flows. Not only are international degrees subsidizing everything else, humanities and mathematics, being generally much cheaper to teach, wind up subsidizing the science, engineering, and especially medical degrees)
> This is an inevitable consequence of university privatization and the fees system
Universities were never "privatized". They were always private institutions that (mostly) get public funding (including subsidies for charging British students lower fees). They are all AFAIK non-profits (as are almost all independent schools, which historically also got government funding in the form of fees paid for some students - some still do, although it tends to be for profit ones that do so these days as far as I can tell).
What has happened is a loss of ethos and a cultural shift to running universities more like businesses. As you say, the focus is on the financial reports.
This will inevitably lead to a loss of reputation of British universities, but as you say, so one cares. By the time it causes the damage someone else will be in charge. its very like banks taking stupid risks before the financial crisis: as long as you are out of it by the time things go wrong, who cares?
I would really like to seee a detailed explanation for why UK universities are so "cash strapped". After all they charge 10k a year to domestic students and fairly high rents, too, for university-owned accommodation...
Came here looking for a comment about Australia. Eight years ago made the mistake of pursuing a post-grad degree there, by far one of the worst educational experiences.
This is a back door channel to illegal immigration, nothing more.
The students never turn up to courses and go to live with relatives in cities miles away.
The bloated UK university sector (your experience of a UK university, if you have it, is not typical of the vast shadow educational establishment which rakes in billions per year and delivers almost nothing in return) obviously has no interest in stopping this.
This has been spoken about for years now among people who work or have worked in these third-rate unis. As immigration filters up the political agenda I expect we'll start to see a mass decimation of these pseudo-educational establishments.
Do you have anything you can cite that supports your point about this being a back channel immigration method?
I live in a city that has a huge number Chinese students, who I regularly see coming and going from the campuses. Not all top universities, either. It does seem to me like these foreign student communities can be overly insular but I've never seen any evidence that they're illegally overstaying at any scale. As they generally come from wealthy backgrounds and societies that heavily emphasise family values, I am skeptical that they'd get higher quality of life in the UK than their home countries.
the goal is legal residency, not illegal overstaying. the universities offer the path of: pay money, get a visa. by not teaching anything, the "students" are free to go work and earn back the outrageous tuition fees, or if they're rich enough, just go enjoy life around europe.
free (long term) movement/immigration for the people to anywhere desirable is dead in the modern world, you generally need to pay (golden visas, "education") or be paid (work visas).
The vast majority of Chinese students do not plan on migrating to the UK. They usually do it so they can complete a Masters in 1 year instead of the 2 years required by Chinese universities. Having an international degree also holds weight in the domestic job market.
The visa is (a) not permanent and (b) only valid for the UK, which was never in Schengen; if you are a non-EU national you need to get a visa for each European country you plan to visit, separately, according to their rules.
And with Labour there will be no justice here. Tax payers just have to keep paying more while the burden is just increased daily and the actual tax payers get less. Hopefully this will be the end of Labour for good.
And the status quo is in no way the responsibility of the previous government which continuously spewed anti-migrant rhetoric while doing basically nothing to reduce total immigration?
The Tories are definitely also responsible, and I hope this is the end of the Tory party. They are even worse than Labour in that they have been basically defrauded the voters by claiming to be conservative but being anything but. Labour at least made it clear to their voters they plan to run the country off a cliff at max speed, which is why they won by default and have no mandate.
I don't know that accusing the current ruling party (I'm not familiar with UK politics so I'm not for or against this party) of irrational policy that results in the hard-working natives to pay more and more tax money to support all those freeloading foreigners, without including any substantial argument to support that claim, or alternatively linking a source, is a good fit for an HN discussion
My experience in American universities was that native English speakers in the U.S. don't actually speak English well enough to follow high-level technical discussions of just about any topic. It was depressing.
In graduate school--where everybody already had at least an undergraduate degree--one of my professors finally got so frustrated she paused the course for three weeks to teach the class how to write a 5-paragraph essay, with introduction, three points, and a conclusion. Many students were surprised that this also helped them understand the structure of articles they were reading.
I have distinct and clear memories of the day in 5th grade when the middle school language arts teacher came to our class and spent an afternoon teaching this topic. She said we would never make it through middle school without it. We were 10 years old. It took hours, not weeks.
I don't doubt the problem is even worse among people who have not grown up with the language, but I've met plenty of people who were very technically proficient in their field and had a lot to contribute, though they needed translators, and way too many people who had nothing to contribute who had spoken English from early childhood.
>one of my professors finally got so frustrated she paused the course for three weeks to teach the class how to write a 5-paragraph essay, with introduction, three points, and a conclusion.
Our teachers in school went through massive amounts of grammar rules, literature and poems. They never taught us how to write in a simple structured way.
Only when I studied for the GRE did the learning material really break down the process into simple steps.
I think it's kind of a problem that some teachers can't or won't touch these basic topics, maybe assuming other teachers already did.
It is strange how High School does not teach these skills. Structured writing of different types would be useful in most office jobs. And you only really need to teach a handful of structures to prepare people for most things.
That must be highly localized. We were taught essay structure in middle school. And they was reinforced through high school English, history, and other courses. I grew up in northern VA (DC suburbs) and was in honors/gifted classes from 3rd grade on.
I don't think that it wasn't part of the lesson plan, I think it's more of a "fell through the cracks" problem.
We had a lot of old teachers that were sick a lot. I think the substitute teachers didn't always follow up on all the planned lessons.
In chemistry we had a substitute teacher the whole year in 10th grade. In 11th grade our new teacher noticed we were missing some fundamentals. Turns out we weren't taught any of the 10th grade material. She then did a 3 month crash course on 10th grade material.
With the right foundation it was really easy afterwards.
Having done some Math and Physics tutoring, I never tutored a kid that really _couldn't_ do math or physics. It was almost always that they lacked some fundamentals and thus couldn't learn any of the advanced material, because they lacked a mental model to grok the information.
I had the same experience in engineering school in Canada. People born and raised in the Belle Province could not write in French at all. They made the French equivalent of 'your'/'you're' mistakes in reports and even employer-facing work. Their writing was elementary, to put it mildly.
Funnily enough, one of my pet peeves is how many articles you see around, perhaps written for "SEO," that always end in a "conclusion," as if the author was still writing in the same essay format they were required in school. Reviews, listicles, etc. Always ending with "conclusion" as if that was mandatory.
This was actually part of the 5th grade lesson: "Eventually, you will be able to move past this format. Your writing will improve beyond it. But you won't know when to break the rules until you know how to write within the rules, so for now, follow the rules."
A well-educated non-native English speaker will have a different kind of exposure to the language, mostly through reading. They won't always be able to articulate themselves smoothly in everyday social situations, but they can usually write cohesive text that's mostly grammatically correct and semantically-sound.
At least this has been my case as a non-native English speaker. I usually feel awkward in a conversation among native speakers. I can't always "get" their humour and cultural references and sometimes I need longer pauses to find the most appropriate next word. This makes me feel uncomfortable and turns me into a passive listener.
When writing text however, these pauses are not visible and I tend to write only the stuff that has informational value, without all the wordplay and wittiness.
The ability to write coherently is actually a skill that transfers well between languages. A lot of people learning English as a second or third language actually can't express themselves in their native language that well either. The skill here is learning to write, not to write English.
I was lucky to have a good teacher in high school teaching the basics of writing properly (in Dutch). I paid attention and figured out pretty quickly that writing follows rules and that anything you do structurally wrong you can learn to do structurally right. Later when doing my Ph. D., I had to learn to write in English. Same thing. Same rules. Different grammar and vocabulary. And a bit more scrutiny from your peers who will tell you when you are being incoherent, waffling, etc.
This is everyone though. Some people are natural communicators who can make everyone feel at ease in a room whilst saying nothing of value, and others provide pure factual content in the most unintelligible manner.
There are those who can converse with incomplete information, building off the emotional content of the conversation, and those who can only deal with specifics and abhor any uncertainty or generalisation.
I guess what I'm saying is, we all put our minds to work in different ways and are all experts in our own particular niches.
Those who can communicate their ideas better tend to be branded more intelligent, whereas those who can put their mind directly to action with little outside input might not be seen so favourably.
Yes, but does a student in China fly to the UK to sit the exam? It it administered by faculty at the university on university grounds? Sounds costly for something whose purpose is to filter.
My partner attended the RCA recently. I'm their cohort of around 80 students, 60 of them were from China, and around 80 percent of whom had English so poor you couldn't hold a conversation. I don't mean to be rude it is true.
During safety briefing they'd, say, walk down a hall, then lecturer would say "turn right" and they'd turn left.
The remaining 20 were also international but had decent English.
Doesn't matter though because the only "teaching" that happens is lectures throughout the term. If you can whip out a good final assessment you get the degree all the same.
I don't doubt this is happening (I have even seen "essay mill" ads targeted at these students), and I am pretty sure cheating happens in every corner of the world. But hey, can we get a sense of the actual scale this is happening to understand the issue better?
> She [Yasmin] later found out that of the 100 students on most of her modules, "maybe 80 or 90 of them bought assignments" from so-called "essay mills" based overseas.
> He [A Russell Group university professor] tells File on 4 that 70% of his students at master’s degree level over the past five years did not have sufficient English language skills to be on the course
Come on BBC, you are writing an entire story based on random people's very questionable estimates? "Maybe 80 or 90", "sufficient English language skills", without concrete data or more precise definition of what constitutes "sufficient".
I’ve been considering a postgraduate degree and decided to try a short in-person course at a top London university to see if it was the right fit for me. My goal was to network and be involved in meaningful discussions. However, I found that nearly the entire class consisted of overseas students with limited spoken English skills. Most of their class material had already been annotated in Chinese before sessions even began, and students largely stuck to their own groups, speaking Chinese both in and out of class.
While this might be a great networking experience for them, it was far from what I was looking for. It made me realise that spending over £35k on a postgraduate degree feels less like an investment in education and more like buying your way into a profession.
That said, I’m still on the lookout for a good postgraduate program, especially something in artificial intelligence or business for people with technical backgrounds. If you’ve got any recommendations, let me know.
The UK suddenly going "the foreigners don't speak our language well enough" feels quite similar to what's happening next door in the Netherlands:
The latest elections swung university policy from "do them all in English to promote international exchanges" to "revert to Dutch and make our language great again". Some 20-30% of foreign students stay in the country and the tax income they generate easily outweighs the limited subsidies they receive compared to Dutch students (or so a study said that I read some years ago, iirc it concluded we can give them the same level of subsidies no problem), plus of course the international contacts and culture exchange it promotes. The number of students that won't come to NL because they can't participate anymore (let's be real, who's going to learn this niche language in high school to the point where they can fluently work with it in classes and exams?) seems like a downturn in every way, including that our own students will be worse at using English (you learn a language by using it, not just from textbooks)
I know from experience that the teachers, native students, and foreign students, all don't speak perfect English, but at least for the one I did there was an in-person intake test and, in class, it wasn't a real barrier
As for the fraud that's mentioned in the article, where you pay someone else do do your coursework, that problem exists also outside of students that struggle with the language
I think that is interesting, but the differences are that in the UK the courses are taught in English which is widely spoken, the universities make a profit on foreign students (so we are not subsidising them), and there is a high level of cheating.
The last is because the problem is not that they do not have "perfect" English, but that they have English that is just not good enough to let them study in English.
There are other issues. For example a lecturer teaching a course on modern slavery at University College London was removed from the course that she designed, because she had upset Chinese students by giving Chinese examples for slavery. Cultural exchange is good, but this is not a healthy version of it.
Chinese students also do not usually do not mix with others so that does not encourage cultural exchange.
> [which] is because the problem is [...] they have English that is just not good enough to let them study in English.
Is the cheating due to this language gap, though, or would they have cheated anyway? Evidently they have the money to travel to and live in the UK, spend tens of thousands of pounds on tuition, and pay others to do their assignments. I don't know that the group of "students" taking this approach is there for the knowledge in the first place, foreign or not
That said, I'm open to the problems being different from the sudden focus on the natives' language in the Netherlands, I'm just not sure what to think when the article cites mere anecdotes (of opposing statements at that) and the argument fits great with the recent shift in voting behaviour. The article could be correct in the point it's trying to make, it's just that it's not supported or rejected by the evidence presented and both sides have ulterior motives readily available (tuition money vs. anti-foreigner rhetoric)
> Is the cheating due to this language gap, though, or would they have cheated anyway?
A bit of both, most likely. If their English is not good enough to study in then they have to cheat or fail, so they should never have been admitted. Obviously cheating needs to be stopped in general, but this group of students gives universities an incentive to turn a blind eye to it.
> I'm just not sure what to think when the article cites mere anecdotes (of opposing statements at that)
That is the state of journalism. Lots of BBC stories are like that.
> and the argument fits great with the recent shift in voting behaviour.
If you mean the shift of traditional Labour areas to Conservative and vice-versa that has been happening for a long time, its just reached the point where seats start shifting in our first past the post system in recent elections. In general Labour voters have lost working class votes, and gained more affluent voters. There have been other interesting movements such as Catholics switching from Labour to Conservative, as have ethnic minorities.
If you mean the performance of Reform in the last election I think that is largely because of the deep unpopularity of the last Conservative government, and the perception that Labour are no different (which the new government seems determined to prove true). While Reform is an anti-immigrant party, I do not think most of their voters are. My experience (as ethnic minority British) is that the UK is a lot less racist than it was in the 1980s - my lifetime as seen a pretty much continual decline of racism.
English itself wasn't the issue. The whole postgraduate study was a joke. I came to the UK to study my second master's degree, and reading the university's website, I thought I would learn a lot and improve my English.
The schedule was to have one module per week, 9-5 from Monday to Friday, and then you're on your own! And it wasn't even continuous; there was a gap of a few weeks between some of them. There were some "Language Support" groups where they started by saying, "We are not paid to do this. We are volunteering," which translates to "do not have any sort of expectation of help."
I then started asking questions to see if I had higher expectations or the this is the norm. The answer was, there are "red bricks" universities which might have what I have expected, but the rest are just commercial shops with no academic goals.
Completely true. I have seen this happen first hand many times. Last year I interviewed (online) a Chinese student who had recently graduated from a prestigious Australian university. It became quickly clear that he was using AI to answer our questions. One we steered our questions towards something more AI resistant, his English devolved into something barely comprehensible.
Most universities nowadays have turned into degree mills anyway.
I always stand very far from conspiracy theories and just think that, like living organisms, organisations tend to turn into sentient organisms that just strive to stay alive driven by survival instinct.
That’s the only way I can explain how a handful of people I know get paid to publish papers of no value, who are not going to be read by anybody outside of their tight circle, and they don’t even care about (I hear a lot of “that’s the bullsh#t we gotta do to get paid”s). Most unis where I live behave just like parasite organisms living on top of a host that they try to get the most out of, economically speaking.
The fact that the threshold of decency drops below any reasonable level is just a byproduct of the hosts requiring unis to adapt to their requests (political hires, needlessly overinclusive politics, bar-lowering acceptance criteria), and at this point I don’t expects universities to stand on any ground whatsoever in the name of protecting culture and education.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadThe issue isn't just that they dont speak English, but its highlighting the trend of just buying your degree and thus taking up the position that someone who is in a position to actually learn would be in.
You don't need to pay to a university degree course to learn English. In fact there are other dedicated courses you CAN take to learn English. As per the article :
> Most students paid other people to do their coursework, she explains, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.
In the UK there might not be a slot for the person to actually learn without the international student: they effectively subsidize residents.
the universities are swimming in money, it's not an actual subsidy and in my experience ends up just crowding out native students
Everything thinks of Oxbridge (which are not representative of most universities) as being really rich, but even then it's maybe a few of the colleges that spend a lot of their money propping up the rest of them (the average oxbridge college has some very old and very expensive to maintain buildings and more or less has to beg alumni for that money).
Is it also bad that a masters program might expect knowledge of the subject?
Some UK masters courses are only 12 months, so they're intensively taught. By the time you've learned English by immersion, you've already fallen behind.
That means either you spend a lot of money and fail; or you cheat; or the university drops their standards a lot.
And none of them are an outcome we’re happy with.
> "How is it possible to continue this coursework without understanding a British accent or English properly?" she tells BBC File on 4.
> Most students paid other people to do their coursework, she explains, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.
Because they aren't taking English courses, these are Masters.
At least read the article, it's in the first paragraph.
I started losing interest there. Nobody wants police-style schooling, but if a university allows students to graduate who have cheated on all of their coursework (and presumably on the exams), then it's not really a "selling prestige" problem, it's more of a "this university is a joke" problem.
This is not a matter of prejudice but basic competence.
You don't need to be immersed in order to be fluent. I spoke English fluently years before ever coming to an English speaking country.
But that is, to me, one of)the points of this story. The constant dumbing down of everything under the sun in our society. You could demand that someone has to do their homework and learn to speak English, but instead we accept that the only way to do it is just by hanging around and acquire effortlessly it via osmosis. Why? Why is it acceptable that people don't have to make an effort?
My prejudice isn't against people who don't speak English fluently. It's against lazy people. Someone might be hard working and disciplined and just have no interest in moving abroad or learning English - there's nothing wrong with that.
For research, and for taking UK students. NOT for taking overseas students.
Universities are private institutions that get paid by the state to do specific things. A few do opt out of this.
At least that's how it works in the Netherlands where I've looked into it, and that's with subdidies available for EU students who often don't stay here and don't contribute to taxes later. Source, in Dutch but the graphic near the top is a good summary, where the lower bars are "costs" (kosten) and the higher bars "benefits" (baten): https://www.cpb.nl/de-economische-effecten-van-international...
Rich kids who can't speak English seem to have no trouble buying their degree.
The students get to go home to their own country with a prestigious UK degree, and the UK university gets to stay in business. The quality of the learning .. well, that's not in the financial reports, is it?
International students also get on courses with lower grades than UK students.
As for the second assertion, that’s just false. I had to apply for a graduate degree as an international student before my citizenship was awarded, the course requirements were explicitly identical, the only different was vastly higher fees and proof of both funding capacity and English language proficiency.
Strangely few of them leave. There is a lot of "grass is greener" in British pessimism about their country.
> neither do most of the international students I’ve met
Most do not, but most never did. Most people prefer to live in their home country (especially if they are the sort that can afford overseas fees). That said they may want a degree that is recognised internationally (e.g. they get a cheaper degree that will be recognised in the US where salaries are much higher).
There are also a significant proportion who do want to stay. As someone with dual nationality the UK is my preferred place to live.
Talk to your average kid stuck in 90% of the one-time industrial towns north of London and the grass isn’t just greener… the fact they’ll never be able to afford to go doesn’t mean they wouldn’t at the drop of a hat if they could.
> Most do not, but most never did
There’s no obviously valid complaint about those who come here, pay international fees, maybe work a few years while paying taxes and NHS premiums, then go elsewhere or home.
Come to think of it there’s very little obvious complaint about those who choose to come here legally, get an education at inflated cost to subsidize lower fees for the locals who tend not to avail themselves of them, then immigrate instead.
Except, that is, from the older folk in those post-industrial towns, who don’t want to go anywhere they might have to speak foreign or eat anything but Sunday roast with proper British potatoes (that they bought from Aldi)… they seem to have a lot of less than obvious complaints.
Where could they go that is better? Lots of nice places abroad if you have money, but lot sof nice places in the UK if you have money.
Have you lived in a former industrial town outside London? I have.
Focusing on people there also breaks the tie to Brexit you mentioned earlier. These are the places where people voted for Brexit. its mostly people in the south who say they want to go abroad because of Brexit, especially affluent people who could if they would.
> Except, that is, from the older folk in those post-industrial towns, who don’t want to go anywhere they might have to speak foreign or eat anything but Sunday roast with proper British potatoes (that they bought from Aldi)
A rather bigoted view of people. I live in (an admittedly fairly prosperous) northern formerly industrial town and its friendly, has a (rather boring) Indian restaurant down the road. "Chinese chippies" are a long standing institution throughout the north west....
"In 2022, almost 73,000 former students were issued a Graduate Visa, which allows them to live and work in the UK for two years after graduation or three years for PhD graduates. Introduced in July 2021, the new route saw high take-up and led to a large increase in the number of students extending their stay in the UK.
The number of students extending their stay in the UK through the Graduate route reached a record level in 2022 and continued to increase in 2023. In the year ending 30 September 2023, around 105,000 Graduate visas were granted to main applicants"
>>I had to apply for a graduate degree
Thanks for your anecdote. The International Students come in via foundation years not available to local students. More money for the uni, and the international students get in with lower grades.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/cash-for-courses-the-for...
And what's wrong with that? These aren't overstays, they're people who've been granted visas in a perfectly above board manner.
73,000 want to, at least for two years.
All of these 'students' are now illegally in these countries, and realistically most will not be caught and deported. Perhaps the worst part is that even at the scale of this fraud, it pales in comparison to the mind-boggling number of students being legally permitted entry to these countries, most of them from India.
The expectations from the Home Office for Level 4 Visas are quite well documented and have very specific conditions that education providers must show to satisfy, e.g. the students who hold these Visas attend all their classes. A provider (University) can have their ability to sponsor Visas removed if their compliance isn't adequate.
Part of the reasons Universities in the UK record attendance at all is because of the compliance regime from the Home Office. The story therefore is that these universities are inadequately complying.
There’s a big money in this which cash strapped universities are naturally going to take advantage of.
Employers in India, an example because I know this, don’t care much someone has a degree from UK university even if it’s a prestigious one.
The single biggest factor for an Indian student to go for a graduate degree in developed country is emigration.
It's mostly a money thing: universities are forced to charge below cost (on average) to residents for degrees, so they try to attract international students which they can charge much more for. While some might want to immigrate, plenty more go back home afterwards (The UK has a lot of international prestige for education, so it's extremely common for rich families to send their kids to the UK, including boarding schools below the university level)
The real weakness is lack of recording when you leave the UK. The last time I went abroad there seemed to be no identity check: passports were only checked on entry.
On the other hand it is impossible to get a job or rent decent accommodation without the right visas. It does not matter to illegal immigrants who work illegally for below minimum wage and sleep several to a room rented from a slum landlord, but I cannot see the sort of people who can afford overseas fees doing that.
There are also consequences. I know someone who overstayed by a fairly short time (more due to being disorganised than anything else) who ended up unable to get a visa again for years.
I do know someone who wrote a book (The Professional, by Ashok Ferry) that I think is fairly realistic about the desperate measures people can take to stay in the country, but it was unusual back then for people from affluent backgrounds to do that, and would be even more so now.
https://news.sky.com/story/i-had-no-idea-how-life-would-be-i...
But with very strict legal checks when starting employment and renting property this pushes you outside of reputable employers and landlords... So not so easy if you don't intend to scrape a living by sub-letting an Uber Eats/Deliveroo delivery driver account...
It will be a hard reckoning.
From TFA:
> Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, rejects the suggestion some overseas students are being allowed on courses with poor English language skills as a way of boosting income.
"Students will need to be able to afford the fee to study in the UK, but beyond that it’s a question of taking students who apply, and applying a merit-based criteria," [chief executive] says. "It is absolutely central that this is a system that people trust."
(And yeah, the fixed prices for a degree in the UK for UK residents results in all kinds of strange flows. Not only are international degrees subsidizing everything else, humanities and mathematics, being generally much cheaper to teach, wind up subsidizing the science, engineering, and especially medical degrees)
Universities were never "privatized". They were always private institutions that (mostly) get public funding (including subsidies for charging British students lower fees). They are all AFAIK non-profits (as are almost all independent schools, which historically also got government funding in the form of fees paid for some students - some still do, although it tends to be for profit ones that do so these days as far as I can tell).
What has happened is a loss of ethos and a cultural shift to running universities more like businesses. As you say, the focus is on the financial reports.
This will inevitably lead to a loss of reputation of British universities, but as you say, so one cares. By the time it causes the damage someone else will be in charge. its very like banks taking stupid risks before the financial crisis: as long as you are out of it by the time things go wrong, who cares?
Postgraduate degrees in particular are rife with cheating, collusion, and „students” mainly in pursuit of a visa than an education.
The students never turn up to courses and go to live with relatives in cities miles away.
The bloated UK university sector (your experience of a UK university, if you have it, is not typical of the vast shadow educational establishment which rakes in billions per year and delivers almost nothing in return) obviously has no interest in stopping this.
This has been spoken about for years now among people who work or have worked in these third-rate unis. As immigration filters up the political agenda I expect we'll start to see a mass decimation of these pseudo-educational establishments.
I live in a city that has a huge number Chinese students, who I regularly see coming and going from the campuses. Not all top universities, either. It does seem to me like these foreign student communities can be overly insular but I've never seen any evidence that they're illegally overstaying at any scale. As they generally come from wealthy backgrounds and societies that heavily emphasise family values, I am skeptical that they'd get higher quality of life in the UK than their home countries.
free (long term) movement/immigration for the people to anywhere desirable is dead in the modern world, you generally need to pay (golden visas, "education") or be paid (work visas).
If you've ever applied for a job in the UK, you'll know that companies take their right to work compliance obligations very seriously.
Most students now come from India, and the fastest growing regions sending students are now South Asia and Africa:
https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/chart-6
On the other hand, nobody anti-immigration ever cares about facts or how the system actually works.
In graduate school--where everybody already had at least an undergraduate degree--one of my professors finally got so frustrated she paused the course for three weeks to teach the class how to write a 5-paragraph essay, with introduction, three points, and a conclusion. Many students were surprised that this also helped them understand the structure of articles they were reading.
I have distinct and clear memories of the day in 5th grade when the middle school language arts teacher came to our class and spent an afternoon teaching this topic. She said we would never make it through middle school without it. We were 10 years old. It took hours, not weeks.
I don't doubt the problem is even worse among people who have not grown up with the language, but I've met plenty of people who were very technically proficient in their field and had a lot to contribute, though they needed translators, and way too many people who had nothing to contribute who had spoken English from early childhood.
Our teachers in school went through massive amounts of grammar rules, literature and poems. They never taught us how to write in a simple structured way.
Only when I studied for the GRE did the learning material really break down the process into simple steps.
I think it's kind of a problem that some teachers can't or won't touch these basic topics, maybe assuming other teachers already did.
After that you can teach grammar and then art...
We had a lot of old teachers that were sick a lot. I think the substitute teachers didn't always follow up on all the planned lessons.
In chemistry we had a substitute teacher the whole year in 10th grade. In 11th grade our new teacher noticed we were missing some fundamentals. Turns out we weren't taught any of the 10th grade material. She then did a 3 month crash course on 10th grade material.
With the right foundation it was really easy afterwards.
Having done some Math and Physics tutoring, I never tutored a kid that really _couldn't_ do math or physics. It was almost always that they lacked some fundamentals and thus couldn't learn any of the advanced material, because they lacked a mental model to grok the information.
At least this has been my case as a non-native English speaker. I usually feel awkward in a conversation among native speakers. I can't always "get" their humour and cultural references and sometimes I need longer pauses to find the most appropriate next word. This makes me feel uncomfortable and turns me into a passive listener.
When writing text however, these pauses are not visible and I tend to write only the stuff that has informational value, without all the wordplay and wittiness.
I was lucky to have a good teacher in high school teaching the basics of writing properly (in Dutch). I paid attention and figured out pretty quickly that writing follows rules and that anything you do structurally wrong you can learn to do structurally right. Later when doing my Ph. D., I had to learn to write in English. Same thing. Same rules. Different grammar and vocabulary. And a bit more scrutiny from your peers who will tell you when you are being incoherent, waffling, etc.
There are those who can converse with incomplete information, building off the emotional content of the conversation, and those who can only deal with specifics and abhor any uncertainty or generalisation.
I guess what I'm saying is, we all put our minds to work in different ways and are all experts in our own particular niches.
Those who can communicate their ideas better tend to be branded more intelligent, whereas those who can put their mind directly to action with little outside input might not be seen so favourably.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/cheating-is-now-so-rampant-t...
https://archive.is/OvEa5
My partner attended the RCA recently. I'm their cohort of around 80 students, 60 of them were from China, and around 80 percent of whom had English so poor you couldn't hold a conversation. I don't mean to be rude it is true.
During safety briefing they'd, say, walk down a hall, then lecturer would say "turn right" and they'd turn left.
The remaining 20 were also international but had decent English.
Doesn't matter though because the only "teaching" that happens is lectures throughout the term. If you can whip out a good final assessment you get the degree all the same.
> She [Yasmin] later found out that of the 100 students on most of her modules, "maybe 80 or 90 of them bought assignments" from so-called "essay mills" based overseas.
> He [A Russell Group university professor] tells File on 4 that 70% of his students at master’s degree level over the past five years did not have sufficient English language skills to be on the course
Come on BBC, you are writing an entire story based on random people's very questionable estimates? "Maybe 80 or 90", "sufficient English language skills", without concrete data or more precise definition of what constitutes "sufficient".
While this might be a great networking experience for them, it was far from what I was looking for. It made me realise that spending over £35k on a postgraduate degree feels less like an investment in education and more like buying your way into a profession.
That said, I’m still on the lookout for a good postgraduate program, especially something in artificial intelligence or business for people with technical backgrounds. If you’ve got any recommendations, let me know.
The latest elections swung university policy from "do them all in English to promote international exchanges" to "revert to Dutch and make our language great again". Some 20-30% of foreign students stay in the country and the tax income they generate easily outweighs the limited subsidies they receive compared to Dutch students (or so a study said that I read some years ago, iirc it concluded we can give them the same level of subsidies no problem), plus of course the international contacts and culture exchange it promotes. The number of students that won't come to NL because they can't participate anymore (let's be real, who's going to learn this niche language in high school to the point where they can fluently work with it in classes and exams?) seems like a downturn in every way, including that our own students will be worse at using English (you learn a language by using it, not just from textbooks)
I know from experience that the teachers, native students, and foreign students, all don't speak perfect English, but at least for the one I did there was an in-person intake test and, in class, it wasn't a real barrier
As for the fraud that's mentioned in the article, where you pay someone else do do your coursework, that problem exists also outside of students that struggle with the language
The last is because the problem is not that they do not have "perfect" English, but that they have English that is just not good enough to let them study in English.
There are other issues. For example a lecturer teaching a course on modern slavery at University College London was removed from the course that she designed, because she had upset Chinese students by giving Chinese examples for slavery. Cultural exchange is good, but this is not a healthy version of it.
Chinese students also do not usually do not mix with others so that does not encourage cultural exchange.
> [which] is because the problem is [...] they have English that is just not good enough to let them study in English.
Is the cheating due to this language gap, though, or would they have cheated anyway? Evidently they have the money to travel to and live in the UK, spend tens of thousands of pounds on tuition, and pay others to do their assignments. I don't know that the group of "students" taking this approach is there for the knowledge in the first place, foreign or not
That said, I'm open to the problems being different from the sudden focus on the natives' language in the Netherlands, I'm just not sure what to think when the article cites mere anecdotes (of opposing statements at that) and the argument fits great with the recent shift in voting behaviour. The article could be correct in the point it's trying to make, it's just that it's not supported or rejected by the evidence presented and both sides have ulterior motives readily available (tuition money vs. anti-foreigner rhetoric)
A bit of both, most likely. If their English is not good enough to study in then they have to cheat or fail, so they should never have been admitted. Obviously cheating needs to be stopped in general, but this group of students gives universities an incentive to turn a blind eye to it.
> I'm just not sure what to think when the article cites mere anecdotes (of opposing statements at that)
That is the state of journalism. Lots of BBC stories are like that.
> and the argument fits great with the recent shift in voting behaviour.
If you mean the shift of traditional Labour areas to Conservative and vice-versa that has been happening for a long time, its just reached the point where seats start shifting in our first past the post system in recent elections. In general Labour voters have lost working class votes, and gained more affluent voters. There have been other interesting movements such as Catholics switching from Labour to Conservative, as have ethnic minorities.
If you mean the performance of Reform in the last election I think that is largely because of the deep unpopularity of the last Conservative government, and the perception that Labour are no different (which the new government seems determined to prove true). While Reform is an anti-immigrant party, I do not think most of their voters are. My experience (as ethnic minority British) is that the UK is a lot less racist than it was in the 1980s - my lifetime as seen a pretty much continual decline of racism.
The schedule was to have one module per week, 9-5 from Monday to Friday, and then you're on your own! And it wasn't even continuous; there was a gap of a few weeks between some of them. There were some "Language Support" groups where they started by saying, "We are not paid to do this. We are volunteering," which translates to "do not have any sort of expectation of help."
I then started asking questions to see if I had higher expectations or the this is the norm. The answer was, there are "red bricks" universities which might have what I have expected, but the rest are just commercial shops with no academic goals.
I always stand very far from conspiracy theories and just think that, like living organisms, organisations tend to turn into sentient organisms that just strive to stay alive driven by survival instinct.
That’s the only way I can explain how a handful of people I know get paid to publish papers of no value, who are not going to be read by anybody outside of their tight circle, and they don’t even care about (I hear a lot of “that’s the bullsh#t we gotta do to get paid”s). Most unis where I live behave just like parasite organisms living on top of a host that they try to get the most out of, economically speaking.
The fact that the threshold of decency drops below any reasonable level is just a byproduct of the hosts requiring unis to adapt to their requests (political hires, needlessly overinclusive politics, bar-lowering acceptance criteria), and at this point I don’t expects universities to stand on any ground whatsoever in the name of protecting culture and education.
2. While they may have weak english skills, their is no assertion that they aren’t intelligent.