Universities take students unable to speak English

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES are so desperate for money that they are lowering their standards to admit overseas students who cannot speak or understand English properly, according to a former London University recruitment officer.

The "dash for cash" has resulted in "plummeting standards of honesty in more and more universities", said Robert Walls, who spent 10 years until his retirement last year recruiting students for Royal Holloway College.

Mr Walls first became aware of the problem at a British Council exhibition in Tokyo eight years ago. Approached by young women who wanted to study for a Masters in English literature, he found their English so poor he could communicate with them only through an interpreter.

They would need to spend more than a year improving their English before they had any hope of admission, he told them. But he discovered that a college of higher education was happy to admit the girls and didn't mind if they were unable to write a thesis. Mr Walls asked a graduate studies adviser at a Japanese university which British universities he thought had serious entry requirements. Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics, he was told.

Standards were not compromised at Royal Holloway, said Mr Walls. But he had heard stories of a university admitting a student who had failed GCSE maths three times to the final year of an engineering degree, of students who had failed three A-levels being offered scholarships, and of teachers getting pounds 500 for every student they supplied to a certain university.

Higher education is a multi-million-pound industry in the United Kingdom. Overseas students contribute some pounds 600m a year in tuition fees, and spend an average of pounds 750m on everything from beer to CDs.

The decline of standards is clearest from English language qualifications, Mr Walls said. Most British universities are happy to make unconditional offers to students with low scores "although these students are not able to understand anything said to them or write the most simple of sentences in grammatical English".

His conservative estimate is that there are several thousand such students arriving in the UK each year. Universities have two ways of dealing with them. "The most popular, which almost seems to be standard practice in the new universities, is to allow them to write nonsense but still let them pass," Mr Walls said.

The other technique, popular in the old universities, is to find that the student's English is not good enough after all and that they need to do an extra year, which allows the university to get double the fee.

Fees for foreigners vary from about pounds 6,000 a year for an undergraduate arts course to pounds 17,000 a year for a medical degree. By contrast, universities are not allowed to charge more than the flat rate of pounds 1,025 to European students.

`Foreign students exploited'

Education Supplement