SCIENCE & EDUCATION

Foreign students with poor qualifications are being used by British universities as “cash cows” to fill holes in the higher education budget, a leading academic has admitted.

Universities and successive governments have “turned a blind eye” to the recruitment of under-qualified students for years to drive up funding levels, according to Prof Susan Bassnett.

The scholar suggested that the abuse of the student visa system witnessed at London Metropolitan University was rife at other institutions across Britain.

In a startlingly frank admission, she claimed to have encountered cases of academics “earning tidy little sums on the side by assisting students with inadequate command of English to produce essays”.

Prof Bassnett, a former pro-vice chancellor of Warwick University, who has also acted as an external examiner at other institutions, said she had been asked to "disregard linguistic competence and focus on content" by some of her peers.

Some students she crossed had such poor standards of English that they “wouldn’t scrape a GCSE”, she said.

Writing in Times Higher Education magazine, she said: “Universities have colluded with this situation for years and successive governments have turned a blind eye because it has enabled them to continue to cut higher education funding.

“Nor are those colleagues stuck at the chalk face with students with poor language skills and irregular attendance likely to do any whistleblowing, since it is common knowledge that a lot of people's salaries are dependent on the cash cows being roped in.”

Students recruited from outside the EU are not subject to Government number controls and can be charged far higher tuition fees than European counterparts.

Figures published last year showed that income from foreign students has more than doubled over the last decade to £2bn – accounting for around 10 per cent of universities’ total funding.

Prof Bassnett, a highly-respected academic who has published more than 20 books, said international students with “poor qualifications have been recruited as cash cows for years now”.

Source: The Telegraph

photo: The Telegraph