Brexit and International Students: Pete North’s nonsense about Britain’s Universities
A new year, a new attack on Britain’s university sector. This particular broadside comes from Brexiter, Pete North.
In a lengthy tweet, Pete alleges that the sector’s efforts to ensure financial stability by recruiting heavily from the international student market — a necessity given the caps on domestic student fees — is an act of ‘mass fraud’. He contends the ‘marketing [of] degree courses specifically as a means to gain access to UK labour market’ and ‘paying education agents to recruit Indian students with “bring your family” offers. They are selling what is not theirs to sell.’ So, universities
All of this serves Pete’s wider argument that university recruitment strategy has prevented the ‘re-gear[ing] of the economy away from cheap foreign labour as demanded by the Brexit vote’, as international students fill the gap created by reduced EU immigration. Of course, the Brexit project itself was never capable of reducing immigration (as Pete correctly predicted in 2015) and it was mis-sold to the British public. Brexiters always need a scapegoat upon which to blame the myriad failures of Brexit, now it is the turn of universities to fill that role.
But back to the rising numbers of international students. The substance of this particular claim is not new, the Telegraph, which Pete appears to use as a source, made similar complaints in December 2022. Pete then segues to contend that this practice ‘is devaluing British degrees internationally as an export.’ He provides no evidence that this is the case. He then proceeds to embarks on a disquisition on the myriad evils of so-called ‘second-rate universities’ (later ‘third rate’) which ‘are the only thing propping up economies in third tier cities’.
So, which are these ‘second-rate’ “universities” — I note the sneering use of speech marks casts doubt that these institutions are even worthy of the title — and ‘third tier cities’? Well, residents of northern towns may be disappointed to learn that it is their communities and institutions Pete firmly has in mind. ‘How else’, he wonders, ‘do you keep Stockton on Tees and Huddersfield on life support?’
Stockton-on-Tees is a town, not a city and, unlike Huddersfield, it has no university of its own. What it does have is a campus of Durham University. Durham, if Pete’s claims are to be believed, must therefore be a ‘second-rate’ “university”. Strange then that the Times University Rankings 2024 places it as the seventh most prestigious provider in the UK, as does the Guardian.
Of course, Pete clearly doesn’t really mean Durham — whether he realises it or not or means it, he’s a snob — he means post-1992 universities, but clearly didn’t bother to check to see if Stockton-on-Tees has its own university — or assumed it was the home of Teesside University. But let’s forgive his ignorance. Does he have a wider point? Is the post-1992 sector responsible for flooding the nation with international students, their spouses and dependents? In a word: no. In reality, the post-1992 part of the sector, with notable exceptions, such as Coventry and De Montfort where international students make up 34.6% and 22.7% of student numbers respectively, has struggled to make inroads into the international market.
So who are the real culprits that should draw Pete’s ire? It is turns out not to be ‘third rate’ post-1992s but those institutions upon which he is oddly silent: the prestigious Ancient Universities, the Red Bricks, the 19th-century Provincials, and the Plate Glass institutions founded in the 1960s. 52.6% of University College London students are recruited from the international market, 51.3% at LSE, 47.2% at Imperial, 39.1% at King’s College London, 40.4% at St Andrews, 33% at Edinburgh 32.4% at Manchester, 29.8% at Warwick, 27% at Lancaster, 26.2% at Essex and 25.4% at Brunel.
By contrast, only 13.8% of Huddersfield’s student population come from abroad and at Teesside just 5.9%. If we look at other northern post-1992s we see a similar numbers, at Leeds Becket the tally is 5.6%, Leeds Trinity a tiny 0.3%, Liverpool John Moores 4.5%, Manchester Metropolitan 5%, Sheffield Hallam 3.4% and Cumbria 2.7%.
In other words, Pete’s central argument is demonstrably wrong as he would have discovered had he elected to Google the issue. It is not northern post-1992 institutions — or ‘conveyor belt degree factories’ as Pete calls them — which are bringing in huge numbers of international students and their dependents, but the prestigious pre-1992s.
So what is Pete’s solution to this alleged problem (the mass recruitment of international students) he has entirely misunderstood? As you may have guessed, it is to change the post-1992s back into polytechnics and allow others to go to the wall or be culled. (He envisions the government ‘do to British academia what Mrs Thatcher did to coal mining’.) He believes such institutions, if they are allowed to survive, should instead be ‘offering high-quality vocational training, in partnership with the private sector, allowing young people to work and study’. At present, they ‘short change’ students and provide ‘no valable [sic] qualifications to speak of, and no marketable skills’.
Of course, the post-1992 institutions often recruit locally and do a lion-share of the work within the sector in facilitating upward social mobility. According to the Sutton Trust, 11% of students at post-1992 universities ‘had been eligible for Free School Meals, compared to just 2% of those at Russell Group universities. … 29% of Russell Group intakes comprised of those from private schools’. In short, one can’t help but reach the conclusion that Pete believes that working-class school-leavers should be given access to ‘vocational training’ while a university education should be reserved as the finishing school of the elite. Of course, perhaps a few of the brighter oiks might be let in for appearances sake, but otherwise no. Art, literature, music, history and science are to be the preserve of the wealthy, and the children of the working classes can learn to be plumbers and electricians — such is the traditional and proper order of things.
Another of his fatal errors is to see university not as an enriching educational experience, but as preparation for the world of work and to ‘re-gear the economy away from cheap foreign labour’. This kind of philistinism is sadly all too common. It is also wrong in two key respects. First, it places the blame for low graduate salaries not on employers or government mismanagement of the economy but universities. Post-1992 universities already offer degrees in important vocational areas such as nursing and paramedical science, etc. Is it the fault of post-1992 institutions that society chronically under-values people who save our lives and look after us when sick?
The second problem is that even though post-1992s may lead to lower graduate incomes, there is still a graduate premium. To quote the Sutton Trust again,
At the most selective universities 59% of disadvantaged students become top earners, and 38% for other Russell Group universities. At post-1992 institutions the figure is lower, just under 20%, but this is still three times higher than for those who don’t attend university at all. [My emphasis]
Yet there persists the meritless view that lower graduate outcomes, viewed only in terms of salaries, reflect the poor quality of post-1992 pedagogy. In fact, it reflects the British class structure and our national obsession with social cachet. Employers believe that reputation is a mark of quality teaching. Yet what is the evidence for this? It certainly is not the Teaching Excellence Framework 2023 which awarded both Huddersfield and Teesside ‘Gold’ ratings, whereas the neighbouring Russell Group Leeds and Durham were awarded ‘Silver’. So, if it is not teaching or student experience which determines why employers believe institutions provide excellent education, what does? Simply put, it is the veneer of exclusivity without reference to any actual data or evidence.
Pete also alleges that ‘third rate’ universities are destroying quality in other areas. He writes that ‘pass marks [are] being handed out to anyone who submits virtually anything’ at these institutions. The facts suggest otherwise, or at least that grade inflation is a bigger problem in Russell Group. In the 2021/22 academic year, UCL awarded a staggering 52% of its graduates a First Class degree as opposed to 33.4% at Huddersfield. He claims that ‘they’re making PhDs a requirement for even low-grade university admin jobs that require zero academic experience.’
He offers no evidence for this extraordinary claim, so I went to the standard academic recruitment website jobs.ac.uk and randomly picked five administrative roles in post-1992s. An Outreach Support Officer, a Partnerships Coordinator, a Faculty Business Administrator, an Administrative Assistant (Research), and a Project Support Officer. None of them required a PhD. As a final example, he claims institutions in these third-tier cities produce ‘poor quality research’. As he picked out the North East, albeit with a fictional university, 83% of research submitted to REF from that region scored 4* or 3* in the 2021 exercise.
The tweet/article is utter nonsense from start to finish. Pete clearly doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about and mistakes his snobbish assumptions for reality. But it already has over 1.1k ‘likes’ and over 61k views. UKHE has very real problems: marketisation, chronic wastefulness, the desecration of urban skylines entirely out of keeping with the surrounding architectural style, ripoff student accommodation, staff casualisation, a broken funding model, and bloated management of appalling quality endemic across the sector. We need to talk about these very real, scandalous problems. What we don’t need is lazy nonsense which reveals more about the author’s prejudices than it does about the actual disasters the sector is sleepwalking into. On that at least, Pete is correct that the sector is ‘already collapsing’ but that is about the only thing he does get right.
