{"id":1879,"date":"2014-10-23T01:50:03","date_gmt":"2014-10-23T01:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=1879"},"modified":"2016-08-08T23:49:10","modified_gmt":"2016-08-08T23:49:10","slug":"universities-may-seek-more-eu-students-once-controls-lifted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/universities-may-seek-more-eu-students-once-controls-lifted\/","title":{"rendered":"Universities may seek more EU students once controls lifted"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Gemma Ware<\/a>, The Conversation<\/em><\/p>\n

Plans to remove controls on the number of students in England from autumn 2015 could see more universities turning to recruit students from the European Union, according to a new think-tank report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nick Hillman, who was special advisor to the former universities minister David Willetts and is now director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said the decision to abolish the cap on undergraduate student numbers \u2013 announced<\/a> by George Osborne in December 2013 \u2013 was rushed through and the detail of the policy remains \u201cfuzzy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Competition for EU students?<\/h2>\n

Hillman said the removal of the cap on student number controls could incentivise universities to recruit more students from the EU, who had previously fallen within the cap.<\/p>\n

But this could prove a difficult sell. There was a 24.6% drop in EU-domiciled university entrants at English universities between 2010-11 and 2012-13, the year the new \u00a39,000-year student fee regime was introduced.<\/p>\n

Yet a recent report<\/a> by membership body Universities UK said a number of vice-chancellors were looking to the EU as a potential growth opportunity. There was a 12% rise<\/a> in the number of applicants from the EU placed at the most selective institutions in 2014-15, according to university admissions body UCAS.<\/p>\n

Outside net migration target<\/h2>\n

EU students studying in England are eligible for student loans. But they have \u00a3690m of<\/a> outstanding debts with the Student Loan Company, which Hillman says \u201chave proved notoriously difficult to collect\u201d.<\/p>\n

He also identified a disconnect between the opening up of student number controls and the government\u2019s policy on including students in the net migration target, which has been widely criticised<\/a> by the higher education sector.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf official policy is to encourage EU students to come and study in the UK, it is yet another argument against the inclusion of students in any future migration targets,\u201d said Hillman.<\/p>\n

Not all looking to increase<\/h2>\n

Yet Julius Weinberg, vice-chancellor of Kingston University, said that some universities may not want to expand their overall student numbers, even with the cap removed.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome [universities] may think that over-expansion will lead to diminishing quality,\u201d he said. \u201cAt Kingston, we\u2019re deliberately not expanding, and if anything we\u2019ve actually shrunk over the last year or two as a deliberate policy to try and ensure that we only admit students who will benefit.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had some areas of the university with quite high attrition rates. I want to concentrate on making sure that those students that we admit, we can ensure their success and that they exit the university into good jobs.\u201d Weinberg added that: \u201cIt is of no benefit to students to admit them to university if they\u2019re inadequately prepared, so that they drop out and go back to their communities and say that university is not for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

180,000 more students<\/h2>\n

From 2012-13, higher education providers were permitted to admit as many students with A Level grades of ABB or above, with each university then allocated a number of students they could admit with lower grades. They were fined if they admitted significantly more or less than their allocation. In 2013-14, there were 242,859 places<\/a> spread out between England\u2019s higher education and further education colleges.<\/p>\n

This would change under the removal of the cap in autumn 2015. The new policy could see up to 60,000 places available every year at English universities \u2013 which spread over three years would mean an extra 180,000 students, says Hillman.<\/p>\n

In preparation for the change, there was provision for an extra 30,000 extra places for 2014-15. At the Universities UK conference on September 9 the new universities minister, Greg Clarke, said that 15,000 new students had been recruited for 2014-15, which he said was \u201cbang in line with expectation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Funding question mark<\/h2>\n

But Hillman said the funding for the new policy had not been properly finalised, particularly as one of the original revenue streams set aside to fund the policy \u2013 the sale of the student loan book \u2013 was ruled out by business secretary Vince Cable<\/a> in July.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the Coalition has said the extra places will be fully funded, precedent suggests future politicians may not regard this as a binding commitment,\u201c he said. “It currently seems unlikely that the higher education budget will enjoy the same level of protection awarded to some other areas of public spending.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steven Jones, senior lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester, said that although the benefits of having a better educated population are well documented: \u201cthe higher education sectors don\u2019t play by normal market rules and the risk is that further liberalisation will hinder more than it helps.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRemoving number controls forces individual universities to compete even harder against one another for students. But quantity and quality don\u2019t always go hand in hand, and an increasing concern is that alternative degree providers are putting the sector\u2019s hard won international reputation at risk,\u201d Jones said.<\/p>\n

\n

Next read: Why we must challenge notion that there are too many students<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Gemma Ware, The Conversation Plans to remove controls on the number of students in England from autumn 2015 could see more universities turning to recruit students from the European Union, according to a new think-tank report. Nick Hillman, who was special advisor to the former universities minister David Willetts and is now director of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":5306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[37,10],"tags":[1089,1084,1083,892,885,891,860,1088,1086,1087,183,1085],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1879"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5305,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1879\/revisions\/5305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}