this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)

UK Politics

3073 readers
137 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

For years now, our government and a large vocal chunk of our population are doing their best to keep foreigners out, cut ties outside of the country, and make it very clear that if you're not British you're not welcome here.

Why would universities be surprised by this turn of events? They've seen it happening for years now.

Furthermore, even young people from the UK are reconsidering university too, partly because we were all deeply lied to about how useful a degree would be in getting a job,

and partly because thanks to huge changes over the past 15 years in the costs of university and costs of living, it's become impossible for many young people to attend university even if they wanted to.

Some groups in the UK are working hard to both restrict access to education for our own people, whilst also working hard to keep foreign people out of the country.

Think about that for a moment, and you may be as worried as I am.

Education, along with the mixing of cultures and peoples is important for the health of any free, prosperous nation. But these things are the enemy of authoritarians, fascists...

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I work for a university and there is no surprise. This has been building for a while.

The issue, not just for universities but the UK as a whole, is that foreign students subsidise UK research. When the government funds research projects it only funds 80% of the cost of the project (Look at UKRI funding terms). Higher foreign student fees are 3-4x UK nationals fees.

From another perspective we're essentially selling off our intellectual property to non-nationals which really puts a dampener on our future competitiveness.

If the government is unwilling to pony up the cash to cover research, whilst actively discourage foreign students, then the quality and quantity of research is going to fall off a cliff.