Thousands of British university hopefuls face losing out to international students

Thousands of middle class British students face losing out to international students, who pay higher fees, when applying to the country’s leading universities this summer.

Universities are under pressure to admit more applicants from socially-deprived backgrounds. 

But with tuition fees frozen in an era of high inflation, they are also looking to foreign students as a way of increasing funding and middle England is likely to suffer as a result.

The warning has come from Mark Corver, a former director at the admissions service Ucas. He believes the share of places given to international students by the most selective universities could rise to 30 per cent this autumn, up from a quarter last year. This could mean up to 10,000 fewer places for UK students.

He said top universities had ‘mitigated’ their losses by awarding ‘higher proportions’ of foreign places. Tuition fees at home have been capped at £9,250 since 2017 and top universities can charge international students around £25,000 a year.

Thousands of British hopefuls face losing out to international students when applying to the country’s leading universities this summer [File image]

The proportion of foreign undergraduates entering the most academically selective universities had risen from about one in ten in the mid-2000s to about 23 per cent last year, he added. 

Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute think tank and a former government special adviser, warned of a ‘scandal waiting to happen’.

In reference to Oxford and Cambridge, he told the Telegraph: ‘Every extra foreigner displaces a Brit because the colleges don’t want to get any bigger at an undergraduate level. But that is increasingly spreading to elsewhere in the sector.’

Mr Hillman said the universities most affected were likely to be the ‘top end’ of the elite Russell Group. 

He added that universities ‘run a bit like businesses… you can’t take ever greater numbers of loss-making activity, and home students are loss-making activity now’.

A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘Domestic students continue to make up the vast majority of students within our universities, and include record numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

‘We remain committed to attracting the brightest students from around the world, who by coming here provide significant economic growth, expertise for our international research and increase the UK’s soft-power around the world – with 55 of the current world leaders having been educated here.’

The warning came from Mark Corver, a former director at the admissions service Ucas [File image]