UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
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For years now, our government and a large vocal chunk of our population are doing their best to keep foreigners out, cut ties outside of the country, and make it very clear that if you're not British you're not welcome here.
Why would universities be surprised by this turn of events? They've seen it happening for years now.
Furthermore, even young people from the UK are reconsidering university too, partly because we were all deeply lied to about how useful a degree would be in getting a job,
and partly because thanks to huge changes over the past 15 years in the costs of university and costs of living, it's become impossible for many young people to attend university even if they wanted to.
Some groups in the UK are working hard to both restrict access to education for our own people, whilst also working hard to keep foreign people out of the country.
Think about that for a moment, and you may be as worried as I am.
Education, along with the mixing of cultures and peoples is important for the health of any free, prosperous nation. But these things are the enemy of authoritarians, fascists...
I work for a university and there is no surprise. This has been building for a while.
The issue, not just for universities but the UK as a whole, is that foreign students subsidise UK research. When the government funds research projects it only funds 80% of the cost of the project (Look at UKRI funding terms). Higher foreign student fees are 3-4x UK nationals fees.
From another perspective we're essentially selling off our intellectual property to non-nationals which really puts a dampener on our future competitiveness.
If the government is unwilling to pony up the cash to cover research, whilst actively discourage foreign students, then the quality and quantity of research is going to fall off a cliff.