Middle-class students face losing out on places at Russell Group universities giving one in four places to foreign students who can pay £40,000 tuition fees, report warns

• International students took 25 per cent of university places in England in 2022

Middle-class teenagers could miss out on places in top universities that are increasingly awarding places to foreign students, experts have warned.

The number of placements for higher-paying international students at Russell Group universities have swelled at a faster rate than for domestic students.

Universities have found they can fill holes in their budgets using lofty fees of up to £40,000 a year paid by foreign students, The Times reports.

The newspaper revealed that at some Russell Group universities, the number of international students had risen by a percentage more than four times that of home students in the past eight years.

Experts say that middle-class students could be the hardest-hit, as institutions ringfence their intake of disadvantaged students while also increasing the numbers coming from overseas.

Overseas students are surpassing British teenagers in gaining entry to some of the country’s elite universities, leaving many clambering for places when A-level results are announced this week

Nick Hillman, director of the think-tank Higher Education Policy Institute, said the declining value of tuition fees was leading to ‘back door’ cap on university places.

He said: ‘There’s a real squeeze going on middle-class students because universities want to increase their number of disadvantaged students and they also want international students because of the money they bring in. 

READ MORE: NUMBER OF HIGH FEE-PAYING INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS AT UK SCHOOLS RISES BY 40%

‘And so this hits the middle class. Disadvantaged applicants have a bit of a protection against all of this because universities are keen, quite rightly, to have more disadvantaged students.’

Placements for UK students at Oxford and Southampton universities dropped between 2015 and last year, while places for international students in the same institutions rose, according to data from the Higher Education Statistics Authority (Hesa).

International students took up 25 per cent places at Russell Group universities in England last year, rising from 16 per cent between 2012 and 2017.

At two of the capital’s universities, LSE and University College London, international students account for over half of undergraduates.

Universities are relying on international students to subsidise expensive courses and the cost of teaching a student rises above the £9,250 cap set by the government.

Professor Chris Husbands, vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, said flat home student fees were plunging universities into crisis.

In 2022 for the first time, four in ten UK applicants were turned away from the two most esteemed universities – Oxford and Cambridge (pictured: Cambridge University)

‘It is now the case that growing international students faster than home students is one of the ways we can address that funding gap,’ he said. ‘However, the number of UK 18-year-olds is also increasing, by about 15 per cent, so we are heading into a really difficult period where the core of the problem is how we fund UK undergraduates.’

Business and management is reportedly the most popular subject for international students by a significant degree, with some 217,000 students coming to Britain each year to study it.

Other in-demand courses are engineering and technology, computing and medical subjects.

A Department for Education spokesman said that 75 per cent of attendees at Russell Group Universities were home students and added this had increased in recent years. 

The figure covered the years of 2019 to 2022, which were affected by the pandemic.

The spokesman added: ‘To support our world-class higher education sector, we’re providing around £750 million of extra funding over three years to support universities to invest in world-class facilities and offer more high-quality courses, supported by our taxpayer-backed student finance system.’

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