Higher Education Inspired by the British System: Mass Production of International Graduates?

The registration of new LSE students on the first day was by any means “epic.” Even with a dozen computers working simultaneously to complete a process that takes no more than 2 minutes each, the registration staff was soon overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. The queue of students, minutes after registration opened, snaked out of the largest auditorium on the campus and spilled onto the busy main boulevard in front of the building.

And the crowd that had gathered was, well, a curious bunch. Most came in groups of twos and threes, easily identifiable by their respective nationalities. Small talks consistently appeared to be something not local. Overwhelming noises of Mandarin Chinese are mixed in with various European and South Asian languages, occasionally broken by spurts of American English. Distinctive British accent only came from the administrators trying to keep the whole place in order.

Indeed, judging from the actual registrations, the vast majority of the people in line showed up with their passports, something obviously not required for the UK “Home” students. From the looks of it, at least for the current school year, the London School of Economics will be dominated by “Overseas” students, most in the UK, Europe, and for some, abroad, for the very first time. Looks like the headache I had in Australia with seeing foreigners everywhere on campus will be repeated here in London.

The massive number of internationals, of course, is present for a very apparent reason. In both the UK and Australia, universities (at least the best ones) are public entities receiving funding from the government. Yet, with government budget cuts, educational funding has consistently been in decline for the past years. With no experience in business operations and no asset to operate with besides limited endowment and real estate, they have to turn to one source of steady revenue.

That is, rationally, revenue generated from tuitions and other expenses (textbook sales and dorm fees) paid by the students. To keep up with inflation and higher expenses in practically everything from professor salaries to raw materials for dorm food, schools like LSE are forced to raise both the tuition per student and total number of students. Yet, as a historically reputed institution, suddenly increasing enrolment is bound to damage the image of intellectual elitism.

So the solution somehow became one centered on increasing the number of full-time full-tuition-paying international students. British unwritten academic rules stipulate that internationals often pay as much as five or six times in tuition than that of “Home” students. Increasing internationals became the financial savior of the schools while giving the schools opportunities to boast their “cosmopolitanism” and “emphasis on globalization and diversity.”

What is worrisome is that such a phenomenon in the UK and Australia is now occurring everywhere. In the US, public universities, previously completely dependent on state or municipal funding, are now also forced to lure in more students with higher tuitions. The only reason private colleges in the States averted such a problem is a historical lack of dependence on public funding, forcing the schools to make sensible financial investments (often completely unrelated to education) and market diligently to alumni to create a tradition of steady endowments.

At least schools like the LSE still have that historical fame to continue luring in internationals despite high costs. Most colleges that are practically unknown abroad, on the other hand, are not that lucky. While anxiously executing massive student recruitment campaigns in foreign countries, they at the same time are forced to raise tuition on Home students and increase overall enrolment to pay for such expensive marketing.

For most, the result will be low returns on the marketing campaigns abroad (college brand-names are not something one can establish in the course of a year or two) combined with decreased reputation at home. “Home” students will become more attracted to and compete for fewer spots in the few remaining “high-quality” college (like the LSE) sustaining themselves on revenues from internationals. The result is an increased gap among the few elite colleges and the others.

Yet, even for elite schools like the LSE, the overdependence on international student tuitions is almost certain to be detrimental in the long-term. As more and more international students like me realize the simple “business model” of the schools, they will suspect the actual quality of the education in the absurd congregation of foreigners. Bad rumors will spread, number of applying internationals will decrease, and the little revenue system operating today will eventually fall apart...