UK universities are self-harming by exploiting Chinese students

Recruiting underprepared students is damaging the classroom experience and is soul-crushing for teachers, says a UK lecturer

March 27, 2024
Liu, the Chinese artist known as "the invisible man" for using painted-on camouflage to blend into the backdrops of his photographs, has done it again to illustrate UK universities are self-harming by exploiting Chinese students
Source: Jason Lee/Reuters

When I was a university student, I learned tons. My classes were filled with passionate peers debating ideas, thinking together about the state of the world, challenging one another. Among my professors, I found generous mentors who not only shared their knowledge but modelled the art of living for me.

Having seen how transformational higher education can be, I decided to follow in their footsteps. So when I was appointed a lecturer in a Russell Group education department, I was ecstatic. Now I would be able to re-create the experiences I was lucky enough to have had for my own students.

Yet I couldn’t have been more wrong. Soon, I discovered that British academia had changed beyond recognition. The massive increase in its intake of Chinese students is not so much evidence, as managers would have it, of the UK’s competitiveness in the international higher education market as of the transformation of UK universities into unethical businesses whose pursuit of Chinese tuition fees is diluting standards to such an extent that the education they offer is becoming anti-educational. 

Among the courses I taught in my first year was a master’s module about global citizenship education. All the students came from mainland China. Only two or three had the confidence to ever speak up in class, and the majority could not follow what I was saying. Virtually all had constantly to rely on translation devices.

For the first class, I asked the students to read a short book; nobody did. For the second, I assigned an academic article; no one complied. Then, a blog post; two students tried and told me they struggled. My attempts to generate discussion in class were almost always met with complete silence. Trying to stage interactive activities felt like pulling teeth. 

Being a non-native speaker of English myself, I tried my best to empathise. I spoke as slowly as I could and avoided “big” academic words. By the end of the semester, I felt as if I were teaching a middle-school class. Even then, I am quite sure the students learned very little – yet they all graduated.

“The university thinks of the Chinese students as a magic money tree,” a Chinese colleague told me, echoing the claim of a January Sunday Times article that international students lacking the necessary abilities are being let in on lower-tariff routes than domestic students. That is because UK universities now lose money on educating domestic undergraduates; they can only keep many programmes going with the higher fees they can charge international students, of whom more come from China than anywhere else. 

In my conversations with my Chinese students, I learned that they had not necessarily wanted to come to the UK, or to get a degree in education. But they had had no choice: getting a good job back home required a diploma from a prestigious institution, and there were only so many seats to go around on courses in China’s top universities. But UK universities’ readiness to exploit this mismatch between demand and supply sets up to fail the thousands of students they admit whose prior education has, through no fault of their own, not prepared them for what awaits them in the UK. British students also lose because they too are affected by the plummeting quality of the classroom experience. And for lecturers, trying to teach in such a system can be soul-crushing.

Many of my colleagues believe it boils down to the language barrier, so universities need to increase their language test score requirements while also providing better academic support for struggling students. Some suggest that an aversion to speaking up in class could also be caused by cultural differences.

But while language and culture are undoubtedly part of the story, the problem runs deeper. A 2023 House of Commons report pointed to the increasing activity of Chinese intelligence services on UK campuses, illustrating that academics and students have been pressured into not talking about, among other things, the Chinese pro-democracy movement. And here was I lecturing about John Dewey’s theory of democratic education to a class full of Chinese students, most of whom would return home after graduation and all of whom were likely being monitored by Chinese authorities while in the UK. How could I possibly expect them to speak up, even if their English was perfect? 

Chinese students, like all international students, bring distinct perspectives that can make huge contributions to UK higher education. But to truly include them, we must confront the ideological abyss between our humanities and social science programmes – in which we stress concepts like democracy, criticality, voice and agency – and China’s totalitarianism, to which such concepts are antithetical.

Unless we are willing to let go of the criticality of our programmes, we may have to accept that it is unethical to market them to students in totalitarian countries. The alternative is to let academic rigour erode to the point that degrees from “elite” British universities will not be worth the paper they are printed on – an outcome to which we are, I am afraid, closer than we may think.

The author is a lecturer at a Russell Group university.

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Reader's comments (12)

Modern mass HE is a ‘business’ - and it is increasingly a big and rather sordid business where growing ‘the bottom line’ of profitability trumps all other old-fashioned considerations such as academic standards. At a guess the author of this excellent article is referring to a PGT/Masters course that was probably invented in the Gold Rush of the vast expansion of such courses in the Humanities and Social Studies during the past decade. Nobody knows - or if they do they are not telling - exactly how much of the income from 10-15-20 punters paying international fees on such a Masters is used to provide the actual academic content as opposed to being siphoned off to cover ‘administrative bloat’ and the interest on borrowings to build glitzy new infrastructure - both also features of the past decade of HE (mis)management.
I agree with David; the HE sector has become a business. It is a significant player in the "knowledge economy" and it has some similarities with other service industries such as consulting. HE sells access to knowledge and expertise and charges a time-based fee in the same way that a lawyer or private healthcare professional sells their knowledge and expertise to a client who pays to hear what they have to say.
Excellent article. Lots of resonance with my own experience too.
It feels as if UK HE has lost its grip on the purpose of a higher eduction and has become fixed on the substitute goals of increased efficiency, expansion and the institution’s position in sector-specific rankings. Unfettered attention to increased efficiency will eventually remove the obligation to test student’s mastery, understanding or memory of what has been offered up as ‘education’. There might only be a need to ensure that students have seen or heard the concepts before issuing the endorsement of graduation. Buyer beware.
As an academic the author should be familiar with the fallacy of personal anecdote. I have no doubt that the UK government's failure to support the HE sector has led to a large number of universities compromising on entry requirements (this happens with UK students too!) but the author is wrong to extrapolate their own experience to the whole sector and malign the entire Chinese student population as inferior, let alone a threat to national security. China schools also have a different approach to education so the students need to be supported with the transition to a British education culture when they arrive in the UK rather than being written off. Good academics will considers ways to achieve this challenge. Lazy academics will resort to the rhetoric of the author.
I totally agreed with you. The author couldn't generalize his limited experience to all Chinese students, and even worse, he wrote with a superior tone. I am college counselor at an international school in China, and as far as I am concerned, all my students admitted to the UK unis, high or low on rankings, are all qualified students, with a lot of them overqualified. And to clarify, 99% of our students are ethnically Chinese students. For universities to maintain the education quality for all students, they should think more about how to support the admitted students to fit in the school and thrive both academically and socially. For the intelligence part, as a former international student in the USA, I had never felt that my speaking and my behavior was being monitored or watched. To sum up, I think this article is too superficial with little evidence and details as well as shallow thoughts.
The author's cowardly reluctance to disclose their identity stems from their awareness of their bias and anti-Chinese sentiments. It is disingenuous to propagate such a manipulative form of political slander.
Undoubtedly UK institutions, even very good ones, have let in overseas students that they shouldn't have. But my experience suggets that its not quite the be all and end all of problems this article suggets. We have some overseas students (our overseas cohorts are fairly evenly balanced between a variety of different nationalitilies, not just chinese) that struggle. But many of our best students come from those places, and we also have plenty of home students that struggle. It is true that many of our Masters students do substantially worse on very similar material to undergrads, but that does not correlate with nationality really, other than were lanuage skills are important, such as essay writing. Secondly, overseas students only many up a small minority of our undergrad cohort, and probalby half of our Postgrad cohort, but our home-grown undergrad and grad students are just as averse to speaking up in class. In 10 years of teaching I don't think I've ever had any student voluntarily speak up in any class I've taught. And the idea that if you asked students to read anything more than 10% of them would actually do so before a lecture it is laughable (before an exam is different, and you can sometimes get them to read a short article or extract from a chapter before a tutorial).
To be honest, I can't get my British students to read assigned readings or participate in my interactive seminar exercises. So, I'm not sure it's just a "Chinese problem". We have become degree pumping institutions where acquiring knowledge doesn't matter any longer...
I find it interesting that the example you chose to share was a call on John Dewey’s theory of democratic education. There feels like so much in that theory that is missed in this rather narrow and problematic account of Chinese students. While I can recognise a lot of what you say about the context we find ourselves in as educators, I do feel that is teaching methods and pedagogy that has failed to evolve. Some of methods you describe here belong to a different time. Education in Dewey's view was an important part of social equity. He emphasised the importance of accessible education for everyone. While I am willing to acknowledge that there are major issues with the funding models in UKHE right now and that they warrant closer ethical scrutiny, I do think the idea that we simply have the 'wrong' students who are not capable of learning within our 'system' deserves a similar level of scrutiny.
The article is peppered with thinly disguised sino and xenophobic slurs ('all of whom were likely being monitored by Chinese authorities while in the UK', for instance) and to me it rather speaks to a mismatch between the writer's expectations and the capacity to adapt to a whole unexpected class composition, than to students' competency. I would be very interested to discuss this with the author, if only he or she was willing to disclose his identity. Please do send me an email if you wish: edu1979@hotmail.com Eduardo Ramos
It can be nerve-wracking to speak up in an open forum and more so when English is not your mother tongue. In the context of seminars and workshops, I wonder if the author has tried setting up smaller group activities with an outcome focused task. The instructor then takes on a more facilitative/prompter role with feedback in open class at the end once students have had a chance to "rehearse" and "check" their answers in the group. In the context of larger groups e.g. in a lecture, the use of anonymous polling tools such as Kahoot or Wooclap can prompt more responses. You could ask students to briefly chat to the person beside them before responding. I don't remember anyone contributing in lectures when I was at uni either and it was almost all UK students. Perhaps more training on teaching multi-cultural groups would be useful here.

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