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Universities enrolling foreign students with poor English, BBC finds

40 points by impish9208 2y ago

djaouen 2y ago
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?
- was_a_dev 2y ago
  In this context, its not so much the prejudice but the exploitation of such students and the devaluation of the degree as a result.
- bilekas 2y ago
  > 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.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    >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.
    - lurking15 2y ago
      > 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
      - rcxdude 2y ago
        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).
- gadders 2y ago
  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.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  For post graduate degrees where communication is a large portion of the coursework? Is it also bad that a masters program might expect knowledge of the subject?
- michaelt 2y ago
  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. And none of them are an outcome we’re happy with.
- happymellon 2y ago
  > 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.
  - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    "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.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  How are you supposed to learn a course taught in English if you don't speak English at a reasonable level?
  - eimrine 2y ago
    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.
- Double_a_92 2y ago
  By just studying, and consuming media in that language? You certainly don't need to enrol in some masters course in UK for that.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  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.
- goralph 2y ago
  Would you want to work with someone who you couldn’t communicate with? This is not a matter of prejudice but basic competence.
- kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
  > 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.
- flanked-evergl 2y ago
  Not in a university in England on the UK tax payer's dime.
  - desas 2y ago
    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.
    - flanked-evergl 2y ago
      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.
      - graemep 2y ago
        > UK Universities receive taxpayer funding 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.
      - pjc50 2y ago
        Overseas students do not cost the state anything. They are not entitled to any benefits. They are limited to working 20 hours per week.
  - Aachen 2y ago
    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-internationalisering-het-hoger-onderwijs-en-mbo-0 https://www.cpb.nl/de-economische-effecten-van-international...
- jappgar 2y ago
  The prejudice is indeed against poor English speakers. Rich kids who can't speak English seem to have no trouble buying their degree.
- Aachen 2y ago
  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
pjc50 2y ago
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?
- gadders 2y ago
  The subtext is that the students don't return home, and some of these universities are just a way for people to get a Visa to live in the UK. International students also get on courses with lower grades than UK students.
  - yawpitch 2y ago
    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.
    - graemep 2y ago
      > 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.
goralph 2y ago
Happening in Australia for more than a decade Postgraduate degrees in particular are rife with cheating, collusion, and „students” mainly in pursuit of a visa than an education.
- equilibrium 2y ago
  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.
tompccs 2y ago
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.
- willvarfar 2y ago
  Aren't the anecdotes in the article about students who actually turn up and study?
- Sanchless 2y ago
  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.
  - arccy 2y ago
    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).
    - 2y ago
smeej 2y ago
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.
- carlmr 2y ago
  >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.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    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. After that you can teach grammar and then art...
    - 2y ago
emmelaich 2y ago
Also read this recent opinion piece from a major Australian newspaper. https://www.smh.com.au/national/cheating-is-now-so-rampant-that-uni-degrees-have-become-worthless-20241119-p5krwq.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/cheating-is-now-so-rampant-t... https://archive.is/OvEa5 https://archive.is/OvEa5
Hilift 2y ago
It's called "an entrance exam".
- MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  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.
bazhova 2y ago
Isn't this already common knowledge? 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.
n144q 2y ago
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".
mtrovo 2y ago
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.
- kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
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Aachen 2y ago
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
- graemep 2y ago
  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.
  - Aachen 2y ago
    > and there is a high level of cheating. > [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)
deleted 2y ago
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Oras 2y ago
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.
Daub 2y ago
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.
aaron695 2y ago
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0xCAP 2y ago
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.
daft_pink 2y ago
1. Every business I’ve worked for targets customers with the ability to pay. 2. While they may have weak english skills, their is no assertion that they aren’t intelligent.

40 points by impish9208 2y ago

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?

was_a_dev 2y ago
In this context, its not so much the prejudice but the exploitation of such students and the devaluation of the degree as a result.
bilekas 2y ago
> 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.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  >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.
  - lurking15 2y ago
    > 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
    - rcxdude 2y ago
      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).
gadders 2y ago
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.
maxerickson 2y ago
For post graduate degrees where communication is a large portion of the coursework? Is it also bad that a masters program might expect knowledge of the subject?
michaelt 2y ago
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. And none of them are an outcome we’re happy with.
happymellon 2y ago
> 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.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  "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.
RobotToaster 2y ago
How are you supposed to learn a course taught in English if you don't speak English at a reasonable level?
- eimrine 2y ago
  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.
Double_a_92 2y ago
By just studying, and consuming media in that language? You certainly don't need to enrol in some masters course in UK for that.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
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.
goralph 2y ago
Would you want to work with someone who you couldn’t communicate with? This is not a matter of prejudice but basic competence.
kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
> 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.
flanked-evergl 2y ago
Not in a university in England on the UK tax payer's dime.
- desas 2y ago
  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.
  - flanked-evergl 2y ago
    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.
    - graemep 2y ago
      > UK Universities receive taxpayer funding 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.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      Overseas students do not cost the state anything. They are not entitled to any benefits. They are limited to working 20 hours per week.
- Aachen 2y ago
  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-internationalisering-het-hoger-onderwijs-en-mbo-0 https://www.cpb.nl/de-economische-effecten-van-international...
jappgar 2y ago
The prejudice is indeed against poor English speakers. Rich kids who can't speak English seem to have no trouble buying their degree.
Aachen 2y ago
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

pjc50 2y ago

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?

gadders 2y ago
The subtext is that the students don't return home, and some of these universities are just a way for people to get a Visa to live in the UK. International students also get on courses with lower grades than UK students.
- yawpitch 2y ago
  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.
  - graemep 2y ago
    > 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.

goralph 2y ago

Happening in Australia for more than a decade Postgraduate degrees in particular are rife with cheating, collusion, and „students” mainly in pursuit of a visa than an education.

equilibrium 2y ago
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.

tompccs 2y ago

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.

willvarfar 2y ago
Aren't the anecdotes in the article about students who actually turn up and study?
Sanchless 2y ago
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.
- arccy 2y ago
  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).
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smeej 2y ago

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.

carlmr 2y ago
>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.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  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. After that you can teach grammar and then art...
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emmelaich 2y ago

Also read this recent opinion piece from a major Australian newspaper. https://www.smh.com.au/national/cheating-is-now-so-rampant-that-uni-degrees-have-become-worthless-20241119-p5krwq.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/cheating-is-now-so-rampant-t... https://archive.is/OvEa5 https://archive.is/OvEa5

Hilift 2y ago

It's called "an entrance exam".

MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
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.

bazhova 2y ago

Isn't this already common knowledge? 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.

n144q 2y ago

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".

mtrovo 2y ago

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.

kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
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Aachen 2y ago

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

graemep 2y ago
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.
- Aachen 2y ago
  > and there is a high level of cheating. > [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)

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Oras 2y ago

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.

Daub 2y ago

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.

aaron695 2y ago

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0xCAP 2y ago

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.

daft_pink 2y ago

1. Every business I’ve worked for targets customers with the ability to pay. 2. While they may have weak english skills, their is no assertion that they aren’t intelligent.