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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

Tuition fees for international students were already very expensive in the UK compared to most of the EU. Surely this will only make things worse? Is the goal to reduce the number of int'l students?

I couldn't afford full time tuition in the early 2000s, in spite of working a half time job while at uni.

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After Brexit the tuition even for Europeans increased from 10K£ pounds a year to 40K£. A thousand pounds will not change much. It does of course change the kind of people they can admit from abroad, but it seems that the UK has a lot of demand. When I did an Erasmus MSc funded by the EU, I was the only European in the whole cohort. Many peers explicitly told me that they applied to get a chance to stay in Europe after they graduated. Most did.

Universities get a significant portion of their income from international students. Perhaps making them pay a little more for the externalities they create is fair.

Universities are already on their knees, the international fees plug a gap in lack of funding, can already see the struggle with the immigration changes. If the government wants to kneecap unis income levers it also needs to fund them.

I am fully sympathetic with the struggle of universities but perhaps they shouldn't be spared the need to be more responsive to the political and economic climate.

Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" describes a world in which the academy is entirely sheltered from the real world and develops a culture of dependence, detachment and indifference. Do we want that world?

If we throw money at universities to keep doing what they've always done, we'll create institutions that exist only for their own sake and without any real purpose or value outside of a hedonistic pursuit of knowledge.

We should fund universities to serve the people, like the free university places in Scotland. We should fund research and innovation. We should fund the moral and cultural development of citizens and those invested in the future of the country.

But we should be careful we don't accidentally create a system that can't survive in a competitive and changing world.

It depends on the university and the course. Its not going to make much of a difference where the fees are currently £60k/year compared to where they are £15k/year

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