Britain is a world leader in higher education, second only to America. Long before Oxford had its dreaming spires, it welcomed its first foreign student for whom records exist: Emo of Friesland, in 1190. Its historic reputation, combined with solid performance in the league tables that purport to show the world’s best universities, has helped Britain attract students not just to its best performers but to other institutions too. In the rankings produced by Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University, America has eight universities in the top ten and Britain two.
Another point in Britain’s favour (and America’s) is the strength of English, which has emerged as the lingua franca of business, science and much culture. Pricewise, Britain is broadly competitive with America and Australia. And for over a decade British universities have recruited abroad more actively and successfully than most, both together and separately.
Of the roughly 3 million students at a foreign campus in 2007 — regrettably, the most recent year for which the OECD has internationally comparable data — 20 percent went to America and 12 percent to Britain. This is big business for Britain. With revenues of £25.4 billion (Rs.116,480 crore), higher education is a significant industry. It is comparable in size to printing and publishing, slightly larger than advertising and much bigger than aircraft and space, or pharmaceuticals. Foreign students spend another £2.3 billion (Rs.10,580 crore) on accommodation, eating, drinking, entertainment and so on.
In 2008 British universities had 368,970 foreign students, more than two-thirds of them from outside the EU. Of the total, 47,000 were Chinese and 34,000 Indian (up a promising 32 percent on the year before, though almost three times as many went to America). The number of foreign students has grown since then, though Britain’s share of the global pool probably has not.
In 1999, when Tony Blair, then prime minister, launched an initiative to attract more foreign students to Britain, only Australia and America were seen as real rivals. Today serious competitors include not only Canada but also — though complacent Anglophones deny it — non English-speaking countries such as Germany, France and perhaps the Netherlands. Former consumers have turned providers too, including Singapore and Malaysia, which aim to become regional educational hubs, and increasingly China itself.
Against such competition, Britain must look to its relative weaknesses. Cost could be one of them, though on the face of it Britain is not out of line. A student from outside the EU who wants to read physics at Imperial College London, for example, will be asked to pay £20,750 (Rs.9.54 lakh) a year, and to set aside a further £14,000 for living costs. Harvard charges £22,000 a year, plus another £12,000 or so for lodging, food and so on. The University of Sydney charges £20,000 per year for undergraduate tuition in physics, and about £12,000 a year to live in halls of residence with meals supplied.
In Britain, however, most foreign students pay these bills themselves. Just a small proportion get help from their home governments or from scholarship funds established by their compatriots. America’s wealthy universities offer bursaries to anyone in the world who is bright enough to gain entry, but too poor to pay. More than 20 percent of students at Harvard, including many foreigners, receive financial help.
Nor has Britain been helped by the recent tightening of its border controls. A botched reform of the student-visa system to catch bogus applicants has damaged its reputation in many of its key markets, including India, where students languished visa-less last autumn and missed the crucial first few weeks of term, or dropped out altogether.
The question is where future growth in the market for international higher education will come from, and what form that education will take. A report by the Economist Intelligence Unit reckons China will no longer be sending ever more students abroad: thanks to its one-child policy the number of young people there peaked in 2007, and improvements in China’s own universities mean more students will stay there. Indeed, those institutions are already starting to vie with American and British ones for foreign students, particularly postgraduates.
India is likely to prove more promising. Despite recent efforts to boost the number and quality of its universities, it lags well behind China. Demand far outstrips supply at its best universities, and India reserves a proportion of places in all public and private universities for different castes to advance those at the bottom of the pecking order. For wealthy Indian students denied a place at one of the country’s best institutions, a good university abroad is a better bet than a mediocre one at home.
British universities have done well in the market for international higher education so far, against often better-funded rivals. But to ensure that Britain continues to attract students with the best brains and sufficiently deep pockets to keep its universities world-class, they need to think hard about which markets to tackle, what products to offer and how to forge alumni into a coherent community. As David Greenaway, vice chancellor of Nottingham University says, “Higher education is only going to become more global. Brit-ain needs to make sure that it maintains quality and doesn’t get caught out by new competition. We must sharpen up.”
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)