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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

> How else are you supposed to learn a language than to be immersed in the culture before you are fluent?

The issue isn't just that they dont speak English, but its highlighting the trend of just buying your degree and thus taking up the position that someone who is in a position to actually learn would be in.

You don't need to pay to a university degree course to learn English. In fact there are other dedicated courses you CAN take to learn English. As per the article :

> Most students paid other people to do their coursework, she explains, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.

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>The issue isn't just that they dont speak English, but its highlighting the trend of just buying your degree and thus taking up the position that someone who is in a position to actually learn would be in.

In the UK there might not be a slot for the person to actually learn without the international student: they effectively subsidize residents.

> they effectively subsidize residents

the universities are swimming in money, it's not an actual subsidy and in my experience ends up just crowding out native students

They're really not, especially not money without strings attached (there's a lot of money in research, and lot gets wasted, but that's partly because the broken process of grant funding means that you can't just take the money and spend it on useful things, you have to spend it on the grant even if it's not necessary). The fact is that home student tuition fees don't pay for the cost of teaching an average degree, and foreign student fees pay a fairly large multiple of that, so it's hard to see how that isn't effectively a subsidy, anyway, even if the universities have other income streams which also subsidize those degrees.

Everything thinks of Oxbridge (which are not representative of most universities) as being really rich, but even then it's maybe a few of the colleges that spend a lot of their money propping up the rest of them (the average oxbridge college has some very old and very expensive to maintain buildings and more or less has to beg alumni for that money).

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