TheParagon-Education

when results come out on Thursday are likely to be disappointed when they try to find another course
It comes amid a rise in the number of international students at British universities, with 679,970 studying in the UK in 2021-22.

Undergraduate fees have been capped at £9,250 for domestic students since 2017, whereas there is no limit on fees for international students.

Ten Russell Group universities were offering places on more courses to international students than British students the weekend before A-level results day on Thursday.

They include Durham University, which had no courses available to UK students over the weekend. However, it was advertising 90 degrees to international students, ranging from accounting and ancient history to physics and computer science.

Liverpool University also had no courses on offer to UK students, but had 581 on offer to international students – including aerospace engineering, biochemistry, business management, and English literature.

Leeds is advertising only 13 courses to UK applicants, including nursing, midwifery, and arts and humanities with a foundation year. However, it is marketing 181 courses to international students.

British students have been warned that competition for places through clearing will be tougher this month than in recent years.

Writing exclusively for The Telegraph, Clare Marchant, the head of Ucas, and Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, say that universities “have increased the number of offers they have made in the run-up to results day, which means they may have fewer places to offer in clearing compared to previous years”.

Tens of thousands of students are expected to end up in clearing as this year’s A-level cohort faces a record drop in top grades as pre-pandemic standards return.

However, admissions experts warn that universities are likely to shun British teenagers in favour of international students, who pay up to four times more in fees.

Dr Mark Corver, a former director of research at Ucas, who is managing director of dataHE, said: “Universities are facing many tough decisions as they go through the results for a record 253,000 18-year-old offer-holders this week.

“With the largest move down in A-level grades on the cards, it is likely they will have more near-miss students than usual to weigh up,” he said.

“Universities stepped in to help pandemic-hit UK students in both 2020 and 2021. But this year they will struggle to do so on that scale.

“High inflation has devastated the real value of the fee cap which has now lost a third of its real value since 2012, and most of that in the past two years.

“With their wage and other costs continuing to rise, many universities will feel compelled to take more higher-fee international students to try to stem these losses, hitting the choice of places for UK students.”

The Government set an ambition to have 600,000 international students studying in the UK by 2030. It reached this in 2020-21, with 605,130 international higher education students at universities, further education colleges, and alternative providers. This was an increase of 109,000 since 2018-19.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said: “This is the first truly hard evidence of what we have been predicting for 2023.

“It is a good thing when UK universities are diverse communities with lots of international students, but it is a bad thing that universities now lose money on home students and are therefore actively discouraged from recruiting them.

“At some point soon, policymakers are going to have to bite the bullet and raise fees or other forms of university funding, or else they will have to accept that university courses will be more actively promoted among people abroad than at home.”

Universities in England have no restrictions on the number of places they can offer to students. However, Russell Group universities are typically constrained by their campuses, student accommodation, and teaching staff.

The Scottish Government places a cap on the number of Scottish students who can attend home institutions, where they do not have to pay tuition fees.