An Analysis of courses advertised by the University Colleges and Admissions Service (Ucas) shows that foreign students are being offered places on hundreds more undergraduate degrees in a clearing at Russell Group institutions than their British counterparts.
It means that British teenagers who fail to achieve the A-level grades needed for their first-choice course when results come out on Thursday will likely be disappointed when they try to find another course.
It comes amid a rise in international students at British universities, with 679,970 studying in the UK in 2021-22.
Undergraduate fees have been capped at £9,250 for domestic students since 2017. In contrast, there is no limit on fees for international students leading to Universities favouring Foreign students over homegrown ones purely in the interests of finance.
Ten Russell Group universities were offering places on more courses to international students than British students the weekend before A-level results day on Thursday.
They include Durham University, which had no courses available to UK students over the weekend. However, it was advertising 90 Degrees to international students, ranging from accounting and ancient history to physics and computer science.
Liverpool University also had no courses on offer to UK students but had 581 on offer to international students – including aerospace engineering, biochemistry, business management, and English literature.
Leeds is advertising only 13 courses to UK applicants, including nursing, midwifery, and arts and humanities, with a foundation year. However, it is marketing 181 courses to international students.
This year sees a record 253,000 18-year-olds have offers for University, though with many being conditional and this year seeing a record mark down in A level marks after the more relaxed marking due to the Pandemic. To add to the pain, the situation is even worse in Scotland, where the Scottish government already caps the number of Scottish Students who can attend home institutions because they do not pay fees.
The situation is likely to worsen unless we see real change in how the higher education system is funded, with both the Government and the Institutions desperate to keep growing the number of foreign students to plug the gaps in funding, which have been made worse by rising inflation.
At a time when Britain is seeing minimal economic growth and losing, many of our well-trained and talented citizens flee our Nation due to limited opportunities and an ongoing cost of living crisis. We must maintain the opportunities for our coming generations of young people.
Our young people deserve better, and so does our Nation. We should not be crushing the aspirations of our young people. We need to provide them with better opportunities and clear paths to fulfil their own lives, give back to the Nation, reinvigorate our Economy, and help rebuild our failing institutions, such as the NHS, with more trained staff and new talent.
Urgent action is needed on higher education funding, but we cannot just raise fees on British students putting the burden on them for the rest of their lives. There needs to be a balance of fees, government funding and schemes such as apprenticeships where medium and large companies pay for future employees’ education.
Reducing wasteful ways within the sector is also called for, including either scrapping or massively increasing the fees on the new range of “woke” courses we have seen in the last few years.
It is bad enough that our young are forced to compete against each other. Now they are expected to compete against the rest of the world. If you feel this is unfair, join us at the Homeland Party.
