British universities have sharply criticized government plans to place stricter limits on the number of foreign students in the country, describing the measures as “a hostile act,” The Guardian reports. Last year the British government proposed reforming the current immigration system with a range of measures that include reducing the number of people admitted to the country to study below degree level, introducing more-stringent English-language requirements, and limiting the ability of students to work and bring dependents with them.
Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of Universities UK, the organization that represents British vice chancellors, said in a written statement that “we do not think international students should be counted as migrants.”
As the official consultation period on the proposed legislation ended this week, the immigration minister, Damian Green, delivered a speech outlining the government’s priorities. With new figures showing graduates’ unemployment rates at the highest level in a decade, “to allow unfettered access to the jobs market for two years to anyone with a student visa from abroad is putting an unnecessary extra strain on our own graduates,” Mr. Green said, according to the Press Association. The Guardian reports that “it is estimated the measures will close the door on up to 120,000 students from outside Europe, out of the annual 300,000 student immigration program.”
The Global Ticker: The Chronicle's global-news blog, with updates from our correspondents around the world.
27 Responses to Universities Decry British Government’s Proposal to Cut Foreign Enrollments
arrive2__net - February 4, 2011 at 1:10 am
Since foreign students usually bring money into an economy, and add demand for university personnel, working against having more foreign students does not seem to make sense. If the UK can offer education in return for foreign exchange, that would seen to be very positive for the UK, adding to the UK’s image as an important and influential force in the world of knowledge and higher education. It seems to me that the money brought into the economy by foreign students would be likely to create job opportunities for UK citizens that exceed whatever jobs the students may take.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
Twitter.com/arrive2_net
Dr.K.Prabhakar - March 9, 2011 at 6:47 am
As Krugman has pointed out there is a tendency to shift to Hour Glass Economy with high paying Mac jobs and low paying McDonald jobs.In the process the middle jobs are lost and America has no more stronger middle class, which is responsible for bringing large work force that is capable of innovations. Andy Groove has pointed out this phenomena. America is having approximately 162000 computer manufacturing jobs, which is same as in 1980. Most of the jobs are shifted to China and other countries. While US remains to be a greatest consumer with insatiable demand, what happens to the sociological ecosystem that helps the system of growth? It is under constant threat. Will the policy makers work on this?
mbelvadi - March 9, 2011 at 7:49 am
It’s a myth that “No nation has more personal and class mobility than the United States” – the data is now widespread that this is just not true any more, if it ever was. See for example the graphs on this blog: http://rajpatel.org/2010/01/29/class-mobility-in-the-united-states/
HIgher ed as a ticket to middle class income is suffering from the proxy problem – where once having a degree was a proxy for a certain amount of education that leads to more money, that created enormous incentives on students to obtain the degree while avoiding the learning (which requires a lot more work), in effect “gaming the system”. Obama’s rhetoric seems to fall right into this trap – I haven’t yet heard him talk about the substance of what should be learned along the way to getting a degree. “Get a college education” sounds like code for “get the piece of paper” in the absence of that substance and I have no doubt that many of the American people who are the desired targets of that message (i.e. those who might not otherwise have gone to college) are understanding it that way too.
whitakal - March 9, 2011 at 8:44 am
Wood’s analysis of Krugman nicely distinguishes the economic arguments for increasing college attendance (which don’t seem to hold much water) from the social arguments, which get scanter attention but seem more powerful. College graduation or at least attendance has come to exert tremendous power as an initiating and sorting ritual. Within the business world–apart from a handful of high-profile, hi-tech company founders–it would be odd to the point of bizarre to find a manager who had not graduated from college. Likewise within most political circles. Behind the economic gestures, in Obama’s and others’ praise of college, one senses almost a belief that without attending college one cannot become a full member of the American polity. I would trace the roots of this phenomenon, at least in part, to the post-War recasting of college not just as the gateway to the middle class but, even more overtly, as the preeminent method for freeing the American people from ignorance, error, and unsound beliefs. See the language of the President’s Commission on Higher Education, in 1946, which recommend expanding access to college in exactly these terms. Those commissioners and their political backers rightly saw the conflict the United States faced as an ideological one, requiring right belief as well as economic and military might. But to see college as the main means for fostering such social unity was to take a huge risk of handing the country’s future over to a tiny fraction of its citizenry and simultaneously to devalue and eventually undermine other institutions. Then, to paraphrase Henry Clay Frick’s angry comment about Teddy Roosevelt, the founders of college’s new role in American life could rightly complain, having bought the professors, “the sons of bitches didn’t stay bought!”
mark_r_harris - March 9, 2011 at 9:13 am
Although politically I am more in line with Krugman than with Professor Wood, I am in agreement with a surprising amount of what the latter has written here. I second mbelvadi’s comment on the social mobility issue, however. I don’t think the claim that social mobility is uniquely or continuingly an American strength will bear close scrutiny.
I have seen close up how American college students avoid the difficult majors. When I was a corporate education director for a vitamin manufacturing company, in charge of an internship program that hired students into every division of the company from R&D to IT, I was besieged with “soft” marketing majors. Marketing is perceived to be sexy, cool, easy, and fun; but there is a limit to how many marketers we need, and most marketing students are as fluffy and unimpressive as their major. On the other hand, when I encountered a rare “hard” business student with a concentration in logistics and the supply chain, the company snapped him up but fast, first for an internship, then for a full-time job upon his graduation.
However, students majoring in harder subjects is not a complete solution; there still need to be jobs for them. The hourglass model is troubling. I am currently teaching in Korea, where the men all seem to major in engineering, but these days only half of Korean university graduates are finding a full-time job within two years of graduation. I read recently in the New York Times that Chinese university grads are encountering the same problem. So we are probably at the point where we need to comprehensively re-think the relation between jobs, careers, education, and income; and I worry that we are not up to such a daunting problem.
quidditas - March 9, 2011 at 9:35 am
“What does it mean when someone like Krugman jumps ship from the ideological consensus that usually rules in these matters? It means essentially that the jig is up.”
Krugman, free trader and High Priest purveyor of liberal conventional wisdom in the NY Times, *is* acknowledging that the “education as economic cure-all” jig is indeed up. He’s only 10 years too late–the jig was up when the tech bubble burst in 2001, the spectacular end of the nation’s generation long technology driven growth engine.
A nice “Year 2000″ millenial send off to something that began in the 60s, when the baby boomers who drove it didn’t even need college degrees to work in high tech.
(Gasp! How did they ever do that without us?) Wait–do we still teach history in the corporate university?
Anyway, now that technology is no longer providing work for even technology graduates, as well as revolutionizing every form of content delivery coveted by the arts and liberal arts, and undermining income from creative copyright and etc, what the US needs is a new industrial policy for the 21st century.
This new industrial policy should do SOMETHING other than print money and pour it into zombie banks that are permitted to nevertheless engage in high stakes gambling in the global casino–only to stick the US taxpayer with the bill for its repeated losses–which is our current default industrial policy.
I predict Krugman is going to prove much more consistent than you think in the end. Which for him, as High Priest purveyor of liberal conventional wisdom in the NY Times, will likely once again arrive about 10 years too late.
drgarysgoodman - March 9, 2011 at 9:41 am
I am a self-employed, professional consultant.
I market myself, continuously. I adjust my “products” incessantly, to create, sustain, and recover competitive advantage.
Whenever there are gaps, discontinuities between the value I think I am offering, and the value I am actually delivering, from the client’s point of view, my income suffers. I have to recalibrate, invest in R & D, hoping that the next client will help me to recover the costs of my downtime.
After I create a breakthrough, I am imitated. Cheaper clones come forth. Instead of defending my ego and existing products, I have to phase them out, and develop new ones.
I have been broke. I have also prospered.
But my true wealth, as my grandfather sagely said, “Is under my hat.”
I think, therefore, I earn.
If a college education helps people to think, they too, can adjust, create value, market themselves, and become and remain productive. If it fails to achieve this purpose, and people can learn to do what I just enumerated by alternative means, then that’s fine, too.
My five college degrees, all earned after I was employed, have been a net plus.
However, I had an advantage. I didn’t suffer from the delusion my degrees were or are an entitlement.
It’s one thing to say our society needs to focus on job creation–a proposition I endorse. Jobs-and-dignity are conjoined. What is missing from the dialogue, including Krugman’s input, is a practical understanding of how jobs are created.
Inevitably, this leads to the question: What is “value?” This is, simultaneously, one of the most philosophical and practical questions one will ever ponder.
quidditas - March 9, 2011 at 9:45 am
Although, to be fair. Krugman did say, repeatedly, that we needed to bust up the “too big to fail” banks that held up the US Treasury while threatening total economic meltdown and which continue to hold the entire country captive BOTH to the next catastrophe from continuing risk taking AND with its deficit mongering around the country.
Only Obama, the candidate of liberal academia, just couldn’t muster the integrity–or the proper administrative team– to do what every independent economist not bought up by the financial industry and outside the Chicago School and Harvard Business was telling him *to* do.
quidditas - March 9, 2011 at 9:59 am
“As Krugman has pointed out there is a tendency to shift to Hour Glass Economy with high paying Mac jobs and low paying McDonald jobs.In the process the middle jobs are lost and America has no more stronger middle class”
If you read him closely, that’s NOT what Krugman is saying. He’s saying that there is no need to employ lots of “symbolic analysts.” This too, can be obtained through technology or obtained on the cheap elsewhere:
The discovery process in law can be done through technology not through countless paid legal hours. Engineers salaried at $45,000 in the US work for $7,000 in India.
In other words, the floor is also falling out from under the top floors.
For that matter, the floor fell out from under Wall Street, just as it fell out from under construction and real estate. But Wall Street was propped up by the US Treasury– and bankers on the public dole haven’t taken a pay cut and don’t intend to.
Thus, deficit mongering in Washington DC and across the nation.
“Will the policy makers work on this?”
As far as they’re concerned, they are working on it.
mainiac - March 9, 2011 at 11:03 am
I agree with Krugman concerning banks running Congress: end it.
“In an age of expressive individualism, college provides a majority of students the occasion to define themselves against their own civilization or cultural inheritance”….Charlie Sheen made 1.9 million an episode without finishing high school, and of course, college.
Perhaps the US needs a “Trades” option in the academic circuit.
edwoof - March 9, 2011 at 11:37 am
I know I risk being repetative from my comments on other articles, but the main problem in the US is that students leaving highschool have no alternative–and believe that they have no alternative– but to go to college or university if they want a system of structured learning. Unlike many other countries, in the US there is no comprehensive trainee/apprentice system that combines practical industry training with theory introduced in classes. Quite frankly, we need to bring back the guilds.
We also have a serious case of latent adolescence in this country which means that even though college students are “adults” in age they have social and coping skills more in common with adolescents and therefore are not prepared to seriously consider occupational preparation or undertake highereducation at 18, 19, or 20. I have a theory why this is case in the US compared with other countries. In most societies, there is a single age and associated rite of passage that defines adulthood. In the US, we parcel out the priviledges of adulthood over a five year period. The legal age for driving is 16, voting is 18 and drinking is 21. The age of consent varies between 16 and 18, depending on the state. This prolonged adolescent state certainly has a correlational relationship to retention levels. As Wood says, “…students from abroad are often better able to take advantage of American higher eucation than their American counterparts…” This is because they are adults rather than adolescents when they attend university.
maw57 - March 9, 2011 at 11:54 am
“What is missing from the dialogue, including Krugman’s input, is a practical understanding of how jobs are created. Inevitably, this leads to the question: What is “value?” This is, simultaneously, one of the most philosophical and practical questions one will ever ponder.”
Yes, this really gets to the heart of the matter. I was surprised to read Krugman’s piece, then disappointed that he seemed not to offer any sense of a remedy or a direction. But then, on further reflection, one realizes that doing so is a huge challenge, one articulated well by the post above. It’s very easy for faculty to keep their heads down and just do what we’ve been doing, but that will only make the value of what we hope to offer continue to decline over time. Coincidentally, before reading this I was exploring the React to the Past pedagogy explored elsewhere in this issue of the Chron, wondering if it could be adapted to literary study (if so, I haven’t figured out how). Granted, this sort of thing alone won’t be enough to transform higher education to meet new challenges, but simple steps at the level of pedagogy and curriculum are nevertheless necessary.
mjopling - March 9, 2011 at 11:55 am
Good article and a topic that deserves far more attention, especially by our politicians. However, there are three points of context that are ignored.
1) Higher education was originally designed for society’s elite and its basic design has not changed much even though the necessity of higher education for the vast majority of society (regardless of individual capability or interest) is widely embraced.
2) The basic education model was developed when getting an education outside of university was very difficult. Remember, originally books were scarce and information and discussion was not available through the internet and other media. Many would argue that today it is possible to get quite an education without going to college.
3) Having a more educated citizenry does not per se lead to more jobs or better jobs; it just leads to greater competition for the jobs that exist.
It is hard to be optimistic about positive change in higher education given the dearth of meaningful market segmentation, lack of transparency as to outcomes (most universities have no good way of measuring true accomplishment and don’t even attempt to track post graduate success, much less make any attempt at making sure that matriculating students make informed and considered choices) and lack of competition amongst institutions. The reduction in state funding underway may force some positive change, painful as it may be.
unemployedacademic - March 9, 2011 at 12:14 pm
This is ludicrous. Produce-little elites colluded with oppressive governments like those in China and Saudi Arabia to steal wealth from workers across the world then threw millions of Americans out of work, and unemployed Americans are to blame because they are immoral and decadent? How stupid do conservatives think we are?
The solution to our economic collapse is simple: take the stolen wealth from the wealthy and use it to invest in sustainable growth for everyone. If automation reduces the need for human labor, then spread the gains to all workers, not just the tiny, unproductive minority of the population that happens to own things.
sand6432 - March 9, 2011 at 2:01 pm
The obsession with mass education in this country at the collegiate level has long been counterproductive. I like the suggestion by “edwoof” about bringing back the guilds. There is still need for skilled crafts workers in this country doing work that cannot be outsourced, like carpentry and auto mechanics. My son spent two years at a public university and then opted to go to a technical school for training as an auto mechanic and has been happily employed ever since. (And this is a skill that requires training; no longer can the average Joe repair a car engine since so much depends on computerization.)
Prof. Wood focuses on higher education, but where equal opportunity needs to be the focus is in K-12. If equal opportunity exists at that level, then there is no injustice in having some students prefer careers that do not demand a college education.
The value of a college education comes not only or even primarily from its content, however, but from the network of contacts that this experience affords. This is true not only for entry-level jobs but for C-suite jobs as well. My college classmate Mark Granovetter wrote about this many years ago, and it remains true today.
Prof. Wood seems to think that higher education maintains a bias against the free market and its associated values. Then how does he explain the phenomenon that has come to be known as the corporatization of higher education? If anything, as people like Bill Gates have emphasized, higher education has become viewed as mainly preparation for a job, and the ideal of a broad liberal education has been fading (though there are those like Steve Jobs who still defend it even on utilitarian grounds). There has always existed a tension within higher education between its functioning as a support for the market economy and its functioning as a training ground for democratic citizenship. The latter has been losing ground a lot lately.
—Sandy Thatcher
tgroleau - March 9, 2011 at 3:50 pm
As far as I know, most Chronicle readers are employed in higher education. As I read these comments that largely say “a college education is a poor investment”, I wonder – what are all of you are doing with your own children?
My oldest son is a lot like the students I see daily who probably don’t belong in college. He does well on most standardized tests but his grades aren’t very good. He’s simply not interested in what they’re trying to teach him in high school and I don’t think he’ll suddenly turn into a great student just by stepping foot onto a college campus.
However, we live in a largely white collar community where the culture has convinced him that skilled trades are for losers and the military is for super-losers so he’s ignored my efforts to get him to consider non-college options. Since he wants to go to college I’m going to do what I can to help him get into one. While I think I agree with Krugman’s assessment of a college education, my actions seem to say something else.
Then there’s our very jobs. Many, many PhD’s are already unemployed or underemployed. Do we really want to divert the masses from pursuing a college education? How many of us would be laid off if nationwide college enrollments dropped by 40-50%?
If college isn’t the answer, then what is? We have Krugman’s prescription but I’d like to know what my fellow educators recommend.
dhubin - March 9, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Wood says, ” No nation has more personal and class mobility than the United States…”
It’s time to stop lying to ourselves about ourselves. It is NOT true that no nation has more personal and class mobility than the United States. See, for example:
(http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=35&articleid=85§ionid=515) and (http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP_InternationalComparisons_ChapterIII.pdf).
bolmanl - March 9, 2011 at 5:14 pm
College might not cause trgroleau’s son to fall in love with the life of the mind, but it could, and it’s likely to serve him well in other ways.
As Wood acknowledges, college graduates earn more than non-graduates. People with some college earn more than people with none. At least from 1980 to 2006, the education premium was increasing, not decreasing. It was also larger for minorities than whites. Since overall real incomes were fairly stagnant in that period, it meant that the less educated were getting poorer while the better educated were getting richer. Across the 50 states, there is a strong correlation between levels of education and personal income. Income isn’t the only, nor necessarily the most important, argument for higher education. But until that premium starts to disappear, I’ll continue to believe that better higher education options for more people would be a very good thing.
quidditas - March 9, 2011 at 5:17 pm
“If college isn’t the answer, then what is? We have Krugman’s prescription but I’d like to know what my fellow educators recommend.”
This is where that education for citizenship everyone is allegedly giving should come in handy…
unemployedacademic - March 9, 2011 at 5:50 pm
The answer is “none of the above.” The question you are asking is posed in a multiple-choice exam, the answers for which have artificially been limited by the composers of the test (free-market economists). First, they encouraged systemic unemployment so that they would have a pool of free labor to sink wages. Then, they encouraged us to see education as a private good so that individuals would foot the entire bill. Then, they encouraged us to see education as training so that they could dip into the pool of unemployed, but trained, workers to purchase skills on demand and slough them off when those skills were no longer in immediate demand (cue retraining at community colleges). Why, after all, should they pay for any “down time”? Now, they don’t even need American consumers anymore — there are 500 million middle-class Chinese, a figure larger than the entire population of the US. If it weren’t for the American military, which serves the interests of American elites and balances out the tyrannical power of the Chinese government, all of the corporations would have pulled up stakes and gone long ago.
Your son can’t win by educating himself for a disintegrating economy. He has to educate himself for the aftermath, and a university is one of the few places left with a diversity of knowledge and values concentrated on a personal level.
peterwwood - March 9, 2011 at 7:48 pm
Dear dhubin, thanks for the link to the article on economic mobility in the U.S. It makes the point that we have less of it than we once did, but it also shows we still have an extraordinary degree of it. Indications that there is more mobility elsewhere need to be read circumspectly.
Peter Wood
Dr.K.Prabhakar - March 10, 2011 at 1:06 am
Thanks for your posting. I have gone through Raj Patel’s Blog and the data indicates that there is a clear class stratification. However, one has pointed out that through there is no class mobility, there is no reverse class mobility! and he wanted us to be happy about it. With continued shipping of jobs and accumulating paper money by wall street robbers at the cost of working class of America~ What is your suggestion to Americans ~ stay and watch their own downfall to please GOP?
Dr.K.Prabhakar - March 10, 2011 at 1:18 am
But to see college as the main means for fostering such social unity was to take a huge risk of handing the country’s future over to a tiny fraction of its citizenry and simultaneously to devalue and eventually undermine other institutions. Then, to paraphrase Henry Clay Frick’s angry comment about Teddy Roosevelt, the founders of college’s new role in American life could rightly complain, having bought the professors, “the sons of bitches didn’t stay bought!”
I do understand the anger. Please see Sir Ken’s arguments. http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/animate/rsa-animate-changing-paradigms
We are so much enthused about Ford Assembly line model and Deming’s Principles that are applicable to cheap production of goods and services~ We think that are universally applicable phenomena which can be applied education. We need to educate our children not according to the state policy but according to their needs. Why our policy makers are just not listening or acting?
Dr.K.Prabhakar - March 10, 2011 at 1:26 am
I think we need to analyze better. Looking at US alone may not be sufficient. In 1950′s and 1960′s the Education systems in countries like India, China and other countries are not evolved and gave a distinct advantage even if they do not have college degree. It is not the case now as a person can obtain more or less same education from India at a fraction of cost and willing to work for a fraction of cost. Now how do we face this? The graduate are there but they are not employable, not because of their own making~ it is because some where some one is willing to work for less. Does it mean he or she need not study or what we suggest?
mainiac - March 10, 2011 at 5:21 am
Education is only one part of the issue. “Globalization works in more than one way,” and is complex. There simply have to be restrictions on offshoring of durable goods manufacturing. The US needs to reclaim enough of a component of domestic industry again to create wealth. China’s (and others) theft of American intellectual property and patents desperately needs to be addressed, how, with no legal apparatus in China I don’t know. The currency farce must be remedied through punitive tariffs, until the Chinese respect law, if that is possible. As I have said before, the Ivy league quacks who posited a viable service based economy, like Paulson, Summers et al, need to be deasseted.
richardtaborgreene - March 10, 2011 at 8:45 am
I am glad Mr. wood is righter than Mr. krugman. May Mr. wood continue until he is the only right person in the entire universe.
pchinow - September 24, 2011 at 9:02 am
This just seems like the continuing push to have more applicants for universities. Why is it a good thing to make it easy for students to apply to more schools? Is this just a response to rankings looking at selectivity. If we allow more applicants, then we can turn down more to look more selective. This may sound cynical, but I really wonder what the benefit is here.