Oxford is the best university in the world, by many standards. While national league tables quibble over teaching quality and student satisfaction – figures that are often simply marked N/A for Oxford and Cambride – the University retains a near-unparalleled prestige for international students around the world. So why have undergraduate applications to Oxford from the EU nearly halved in five years and the level of non-EU applicants fallen for the past two?
Maybe the national league tables are right to fret over teaching and support over research output, especially at the undergraduate level. Students without labs or language classes are often left with only one or two incredibly intense contact hours a week and a lingering aversion towards lectures. It cannot come as a surprise that students, especially those who are paying over £40,000, are not too keen on the idea of ploughing through academic tomes with little support beyond the odd text from a college parent. Most other universities offer a more substantial range of classes, lectures, and seminars.
But home applications haven’t followed this trend, and the international application numbers are not just falling for Oxford, it’s nationally – according to the most recent UCAS data. These are not people prevented from bringing families by stringent immigration laws, which is often cited as the biggest cause. These are eighteen year olds looking at British universities and deciding against them.
Somewhere between the millions of pounds worth of state funding, plans to make Britain a hub of tech innovation, and the lowest corporation tax in the G7, the idea that it is strategically essential for our universities to maintain their global appeal seems to have been lost. Oxford is respected, even revered, globally. That isn’t up for debate. But the unpopularity of UK universities on the global market has weakened the sector as a whole, taking Oxford down with it.
You needn’t look far in the news to see that higher education is grappling with significant financial issues. Courses are closing, academics are losing their jobs, and the phrase ‘crisis’ has been used even more than usual. Everyone is keenly aware that limited home fees are crippling universities.
The usual arguments of “Labour was over-ambitious and financially irresponsible in the 2000s” and “the Tories fatally underfunded the public sector” have, naturally, been bandied around. Yet reliance on internationals’ fees – often from postgraduates as much as undergraduates – complexifies the picture. The tightening of immigration law – restricting students from bringing their family with them and limiting opportunities to stay in the UK after graduation – suggests that governmental priorities outside of education ignore this nuanced reality. The messaging on visas: come by yourself and study, but don’t make too many new friends, because we’re desperate for you to return home afterwards. It’s hardly the most inviting prospect.
It’s hard not to note the irony given that everyone wants international students. The Sunday Times uncovered schemes run by Russell Group universities in which international students were recruited separately to usual UCAS procedure, often holding Cs or worse at A level, and placed on ‘International Year One’ – which facilitates progression onto second year without passing the exams sat by their coursemates.
And yet the universities aren’t attracting those who would have come ten years ago. The desperation for funding cheapens the degree, becoming a pay-to-play. Most in support of high levels of international students aren’t arguing from a standpoint that emphasises diversity or meritocracy – it’s nearly exclusively financial. Paradoxically, desperation – and the impression it gives to prospective ‘student-customers’ that they are only there to subsidise home students – only reduces a university’s appeal and so exacerbates their recruitment woes.
The anti-international camp aren’t exactly motivated by sympathy for those who are being used in this way. Rather, they’re often fixated on immigration numbers, and can usually be quite neatly typified as those you’d shuffle away from at the village pub, lest a conversation begin on how an eighteen year old studying biomedicine is demolishing English culture as we know it. Reducing international students becomes a necessity for any government looking to massage entry figures for this demographic.
But Oxford is different. For many Americans, it works out cheaper than the equivalent degree at Harvard or Yale. Oxford doesn’t, as far as anyone is aware, engage in these international recruiting procedures. The same desperation isn’t there. Oxford and Cambridge have colleges richer than every other university. And yet, international applications are on the decline.
Perhaps it isn’t the attitude to international students that’s the problem, it’s what universities are offering them. Three years of specialisation, surrounded by concrete for the most part, with variable accommodation, disengaged tutors, and a drinking culture that in most countries would be cause for medical intervention. And the weather.
It’s a hard sell when put against the idea of American colleges – however romanticised that might be – whose websites seem to consistently put out sunny drone shots of Victorian buildings and multicultural groups laughing over a shared hobby. For those not set on a specific discipline, aiming for a more holistic, character building experience, it’s hard to see how the UK could appeal.
In this case, universities need to turn the tide. As Oxford loses talent to other countries, so too does the UK’s pool of talented graduates. Let alone the risk of becoming closing off from differing perspectives, experiences, and cultural backgrounds. Otherwise, even Oxford may begin to find that its world-beating reputation is at risk.
