Britain to Seek 100,000 More Foreign Students by 2011

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/04/2006041906n.htm

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Britain Plans to Seek 100,000 More Foreign Students by 2011
By AISHA LABI

Underscoring Britain's determination to win more of the lucrative
foreign-student market, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced new
recruitment goals on Tuesday and discussed two initiatives that he said
"highlight the growing internationalization of education at all levels."
The government hopes to attract an additional 100,000 students from
nations outside the European Union to British universities over the next
five years, Mr. Blair said. Students from outside the European Union pay
higher tuition rates at British universities than domestic students do.
The 300,000 foreign students already in the country contribute an
estimated 5-billion, or about $8.8-billion, to the economy.

The new target is an expansion of the prime minister's Initiative for
International Education, a 1999 program that set a goal of increasing the
number of foreign students from outside the European Union to 75,000 by
2005. That target was exceeded by 43,000 students. Mr. Blair also drew
attention to a new U.K.-India Education Research Initiative, designed to
strengthen ties between Britain and India. The program, which Mr. Blair
announced during a visit to India last autumn, will provide financial
support for specific research projects and academic exchanges, including
joint Ph.D. programs, between the two nations. The British government and
the British Council, a government agency that promotes British culture and
educational institutions overseas, will provide $21-million, the bulk of
the financing for the program. Businesses will contribute an additional
$8.8-million.

In a written statement, Drummond Bone, president of Universities UK, an
umbrella organization representing all British universities, called the
prime minister's announcement "timely," pointing out that "our global
competitors are stepping up their international activities." Mr. Blair
also made clear how keenly aware he is of the international competition
Britain faces. In a commentary published on Tuesday in The Guardian, he
wrote that while Britain "is a world leader in the recruitment of
international students, second only to the United States,"  competition is
increasing. The nation cannot afford to be "complacent," he warned, noting
that "Australia and New Zealand, for example, have grown particularly
strongly, and countries such as China, Malaysia, and Singapore, which
traditionally send many students to our shores, now have burgeoning
higher-education sectors of their own."

Benson Osawe, a Nigerian doctoral student in international political
economy at the University of Manchester, is the National Union of
Students' spokesman on international-student issues. He said the union
welcomed the new recruitment goal but expressed concerns about a
points-based immigration system that the government recently proposed. The
proposed regulations would discriminate against international students
from poor backgrounds, he said, and would make it difficult for them to
transfer from one institution to another.