Chinese Students Provide Lion’s Share of Master’s Revenue at UK’s Top Universities
New analysis suggests that Chinese students pay about three-quarters of all taught postgraduate tuition fee income at leading universities in the UK.
Calculations by dataHE indicate that Russell Group institutions took in about £8.8 billion in tuition fee income in the 2021/2022 academic year – of which £2.3 billion came from Chinese students.
Universities have become two or three times more dependent on Chinese students’ tuition fees
At University College London, Chinese students were associated with 40 percent of total fee income in 2021/2022, up from 14 percent seven years earlier.
The University of Southampton and the University of Sheffield similarly have estimates of 38 percent and 37 percent respectively. In contrast, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge are thought to be among the least dependent on Beijing.
As domestic fees are frozen, universities are turning to international students to subsidise the holes in their finances despite repeated warnings.
The dependence on China is especially pronounced at the taught postgraduate level.
Data reveals that Chinese students could be responsible for up to 52 percent of Russell Group universities tuition. DataHE suggests that the figure could be as high as 79 percent at Southampton, 71 percent at Sheffield, and 67 percent at the University of Manchester.
Vincenzo Raimo, an independent international higher education consultant, told Times Higher Education that the over-reliance on a single country could affect the student experience.
“Diversity of nationality is often seen as a luxury, especially if the cost of diversity means increasing the average cost of acquisition,” he said.
“While [universities] recognise the risks of over-dependence and highlight it in risk profiles, the bigger risk is a fall in international tuition fee income this year.”
Managing director of dataHE, Mark Corver, said:
“With the UK and China having differing outlooks on a range of geopolitical issues the risk of a sudden loss of this income is not zero. And longer term, as the number of highly ranked universities in China grows rapidly, the demand to study in the UK may diminish.
“But even without this there is a risk that by treating postgraduate teaching primarily as an income source what courses are offered will increasingly reflect what students paying the highest fees want to study. These choices may not be the strategic academic choices the university would otherwise take.
“With postgraduate taught income from UK students probably only a quarter of that from China alone, attention to postgraduate provision for UK students, often the first stage on a research career, may suffer.
“This matters as UK students are more likely to form part of the research base in 10 or 20 years’ time and an income-driven focus now may be storing up capability problems for the future.
“It is another example of the distortions triggered by the uneconomically low fee cap for UK undergraduates.”
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