The loss of students from Europe after Brexit is the “elephant in the room” when considering many of the problems UK higher education now faces, according to the authors of a new book.
Based on more than 120 interviews with university leaders and academic staff,??explores how the loss of a once “vibrant” cohort created a “more impoverished version of UK universities”.
Co-author Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the universities of Bristol and Oxford, said it was “absolutely impossible” to properly interrogate?the consequences of the 2016 referendum?at the time because of resistance from the political system.
“Once the Brexit vote had occurred, then it was just unshakeable, it was kind of holy writ. Well, that’s almost a decade ago now,” he told?探花视频.
“It’s possible to rethink this, and our book is a small contribution to the rethinking. Once it’s happened, we have a really clear picture, so academics like us can come in and say this is the reality that we now are in.”
The number of EU students entering UK institutions more than halved between 2020-21 and 2021-22 after new rules came in that?made them pay full international student fees.
In addition to the profound change in student numbers, co-author Vassiliki Papatsiba, a reader in social sciences at Cardiff University, said the book shows how this led to a more “commercial approach” in international higher education.
“It hasn’t improved equity in the system, it hasn’t given more opportunities to students from the Global South, it has certainly made it more stratified, and I think more unequal.”
With far fewer EU students, Marginson said international recruitment has moved from being viewed as a “cross-cultural programme” to just a business, with overseas students often seen as a “bag of cash”.
Some of the participants, interviewed between 2017 and 2019, raised fears that Brexit represented an “existential risk” to the sector. Others were worried that the loss of EU students would threaten a university’s view of itself as European and diminish the international atmosphere on the campus.
For Papatsiba, EU students were a hybrid between international and domestic – bringing a different cultural linguistic dimension and different worldviews, as well as academic excellence.
“I don’t get the sense that anyone really makes a direct attribution [between] having much more competition now and Brexit.
“On student diversity, there is no discussion of having fewer, European students, so I don’t think that there is this direct attribution to Brexit. It feels almost like the elephant in the room.”
One interviewee was worried that reduced demand from the EU would make competition for UK students “even more intense than it is at the moment”.
Along with the declining value of the domestic student fee and ceilings on full-fee international students, the book raises concerns that “the breaking of ties with Europe will render the sector both poorer and more insular, trapped within shrinking horizons”.
Marginson said he hopes the open-access book will draw attention to the “invisible ripple effects” of Brexit and the loss of the “positive potential” from EU students.
“UK universities have just become more insular, more nation focused, more nation limited, than they were and their European consciousness, their European identity, has been sloughed off like a snakeskin and they roll on regardless.”
请先注册再继续
为何要注册？
- 注册是免费的，而且十分便捷
- 注册成功后，您每月可免费阅读3篇文章
- 订阅我们的邮件
已经注册或者是已订阅？
