Thirty-five years ago when I first clapped our psychology students through their graduation, most were white, British females in their early twenties wearing ridiculously high heels as they tottered on to the stage.
Today, they still wear those heels (why? There are steps!) and men remain in the minority but one big thing has changed – our intake of students from around the world has vastly increased. This is even more the case on other courses and at other universities.
International students, who pay more than double UK fees, have become the major income stream to support our struggling higher education sector. In 2021/22 there were 679,970 studying at UK universities – a record high, meaning they made up 24 per cent of the total student population.
The Conservative government’s decision to restrict international students bringing over family members has led to a fall in applications this year. Home Office figures show there were 17.1 per cent (25,200) fewer applications for visas to study in the UK in August than in the same month last year.
By contrast, Labour has vowed to maintain the graduate route visa, which had been under review, so international students can come and study “with certainty and confidence”.
But this issue remains divisive. Recently, two academics published a blog warning that a significant number of international students do not speak good enough English to follow a course but are graduating with master’s degrees. They said the “crisis” was worsening the university experience for everyone, as “staff struggle to cope with this new environment in which they ‘deliver’ classes that are well below degree standard”.
This week, the Universities UUK group proposed that universities curb the rise in overseas students in return for greater stability and the chance to increase tuition fees.
So what is it really like teaching international students? For me, it is mostly fabulous. I specialise in health psychology and particularly why we eat what we eat.
Each year I ask my students “what do you eat for breakfast?” to teach the many meanings of food and the psychology of hunger. I used to get “toast” and “cereal”.
Now we discuss where soup, rice, fish, noodles, curry, just an espresso, pastries, cheese, ham fit into our different cultures, how food preferences run in families and how some mothers still get up hours before everyone else to prepare the daily feast and whether this generation intends to continue this tradition.
Discussions of the obesity epidemic are met with stories of the decline of the Mediterranean diet and the rise of American style fast food and how it’s very hard to exercise in Kuwait when it’s 52°C outside.
And as I explain how health care systems work, and the NHS approach, I hear stories of private health care, and how some countries only tell the family they have cancer not the patient. It is great to have so many different cultural stories in my sessions.
For the students, it is also a valuable experience. They get to hear varied stories which make for a lively lecture. Learning is always enhanced by fun, and knowledge and understanding is better embedded when it is mapped onto personal experience.
Learning alongside someone from a different culture is the best way to break down prejudices as people discover they have more in common than they ever imagined. I have seen UK students develop a passion for belly dancing, for Thai cooking, Mah Jong and Bhangra due to the random accident of who was in their halls of residence or sitting next to them in research methods.
But it would be naïve to argue that there isn’t a downside.
I am passionate about critical thinking and if I have any legacy I hope it’s that my students know how to navigate their way through the modern world of fake news. But my enthusiasm for critical thinking isn’t always matched by students from other cultures.
Some students from some countries arrive having been encouraged not to think, and just to absorb. They have been taught experts should not be questioned, so it can be challenging to open them up to the possibility that what is in research papers, their lectures, the news or the media may be flawed.
This has resulted in some awkward moments when I have had to deal with comments such as “Aids is not caused by a virus” and “abortions lead to suicide” (not easy to manage – how do you respect difference while also helping someone see they are wrong?).
I tell them to start a paragraph with “There are some problems with this as follows…” and give them a simple toolkit of the words to use. One day everyone will know that correlation does not mean causation. Then eventually they start to feel safe, and can recognise that not everything written in print should be believed. “There is no history of Tiananmen Square in the UK (yet)” I tell them.
I also teach through discussion and story and believe that a fun lecture full of anecdotes is the best way to create deep learning. But this can also be a challenge when I have some international students poised with their laptops open ready to dictate my every word and passively learn from what the professor says.
Putting people into pairs, getting them to produce posters or simply asking about their lives back home can break the ice – along with a scattering of over shared anecdotes from me and other over sharers in the group. Sometimes I even make them close their laptops.
And what about the English language? We are an English university, teaching in English with assessments written in English. This is an issue we are yet to resolve.
In the beginning I had standards and tried to maintain them even when writing was poor. I’d correct poor grammar and spelling and dock marks when sentences were hard to follow (learning when to add a “The” and how to structure an argument seems to be particularly difficult when English isn’t their first language).
The universities also had standards, and we had levels to reach and certificates of proficiency to check to allow a student onto our courses. But this has all changed now that we are even more reliant on their fees – and it feels that these checks are far more light touch and as long as the money is banked, the student can come.
This can make teaching and marking tricky but I accept that standards have slipped now and am far more likely to give a badly written essay the benefit of the doubt than a bad mark.
But my take is that it’s the university’s fault – not the student’s. The students just apply from overseas because they can, but it is the managers who recruit them without consulting the academics who have to teach them. And difficult as it is, we lecturers should do our best to work out what they meant to say, use a range of assessments that are not all narrative based and focus more on content than style. And we do offer a summer course in the English language – if only they were made to do it.
For UK students, it’s just a matter of numbers. To be in a minority of English-speaking students on a course or in a hall of residence can be difficult, particularly when confronted with cultural differences in drinking, partying and all that is expected when you have left home.
I’ve had UK students frustrated when no one else in the seminar speaks out and when they find those in small discussion groups hard to understand. I’ve had those in halls of residence with no one to go to the bar with when their flat mates don’t drink alcohol. And students can be reluctant to join societies which seem to be split down cultural lines – rugby, golf, dance may not always feel open to everyone.
One of my students from Barbados was placed in our International House to find she was the only English-speaking student there.
Understandably international students gravitate to others from their own country, so they can speak their own language and don’t have to struggle with some of our strange British ways – but this can feel cliquey if the numbers of UK versus overseas students isn’t right.
And whilst it can be exciting to study abroad, some of them seem so very young and naïve to be so far away from home and without any family back up. I do worry for their well-being, particularly given the family expectations to achieve with the huge cost of international fees.
International students are a key part of university life, and although it is not all plain sailing, the Government is right to welcome them not only for their cash injection into our struggling sector but also for the richness they bring to our community.
They enable us to import a level of diversity to universities, to broaden the horizons of everyone involved. And I love the idea that they also offer us the chance to sneakily export a level of liberalism to the rest of the world.
But balance is key. Higher numbers of international students give us more money – and diversity and sneaky liberalism – but if the balance isn’t right, we could end up sacrificing quality and who would want to buy the British experience then? We export Higher Education to the rest of the world because it is respected globally. If a manager’s greedy eye is too focused on the bottom line, it will only undermine the very product they have to sell.
“Equipping students to work collaboratively across global communities is core to our purpose,” a spokesperson from University of Surrey told i. “We are proud of the diverse and vibrant student population at the University of Surrey, and our international students play a vital role in our forward-thinking community.”
“Our university boasts a thriving network of more than 148,000 alumni in 185 countries, and we are honoured that each of them once called our university their home.”
