I never understood the prejudice against poor English speakers. How else are you supposed to learn a language than to be immersed in the culture before you are fluent?
> 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.
>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'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).
> Yasmin - not her real name - came from Iran to study for a master’s degree at a new university in the UK, but she was "shocked" to find many of her fellow students had limited English, and only one or two were British.
> "How is it possible to continue this coursework without understanding a British accent or English properly?" she tells BBC File on 4.
> Most students paid other people to do their coursework, she explains, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.
Because they aren't taking English courses, these are Masters.
At least read the article, it's in the first paragraph.
"Most students paid other people to do their coursework, [...]"
I started losing interest there. Nobody wants police-style schooling, but if a university allows students to graduate who have cheated on all of their coursework (and presumably on the exams), then it's not really a "selling prestige" problem, it's more of a "this university is a joke" problem.
The issue here is if your English skills aren’t strong enough to follow university level teaching.
Some UK masters courses are only 12 months, so they're intensively taught. By the time you've learned English by immersion, you've already fallen behind.
That means either you spend a lot of money and fail; or you cheat; or the university drops their standards a lot.
Agreed it is the best way to learn, but I would say being dropped into (for example) a Maths degree and having to learn English at the same time isn't the best way to maximise the results of both.
With a dictionary. There is a theory that you need understand only 95% words of non-native language, also if the teacher knows about the language barrier he can try to be understandable with some special ways.
But some of them don't want even that. They want the prestige of a title, while staying in a group of peers from their country, there are whole little "italys" in universities. It sounds strange, as in why do you want to study, if you dont want your mind blown and your ideas challenged? The answer: status, expectations, get a high entry point into a career in a totalitarian system.
There's cheaper ways to learn English than to pay British tuition and live there. Judge my English level from this and previous comments; I haven't ever set foot in an English-speaking country. Probably 90% comes from media, chatting to teammates in videogames as a teenager, and being active on forums related to my field (also before I went to university). I bet you can also get a long way with free online courses if you want to get there faster than the passive learning by doing
It's not on the UK taxpayers dime, quite the opposite. The higher fees that international students pay are used to subsidise the costs of educating UK students.
UK Universities receive taxpayer funding and students also drive down the wages for the poorest in the UK which then makes them more dependent on welfare benefits, and they will likely contribute less in taxes than they cost the state as the vast majority of net taxes (taxes minus benefits) are paid by the rich.
According to the article, foreign students can be charged as much as the university wants. They're paying for it, bringing boatloads of money to the UK to rent, eat, study, and sometimes later work there
At least that's how it works in the Netherlands where I've looked into it, and that's with subdidies available for EU students who often don't stay here and don't contribute to taxes later. Source, in Dutch but the graphic near the top is a good summary, where the lower bars are "costs" (kosten) and the higher bars "benefits" (baten): https://www.cpb.nl/de-economische-effecten-van-international...
> I never understood the prejudice against poor English speakers. How else are you supposed to learn a language than to be immersed in the culture before you are fluent?
You don't need to be immersed in order to be fluent. I spoke English fluently years before ever coming to an English speaking country.
But that is, to me, one of)the points of this story. The constant dumbing down of everything under the sun in our society. You could demand that someone has to do their homework and learn to speak English, but instead we accept that the only way to do it is just by hanging around and acquire effortlessly it via osmosis. Why? Why is it acceptable that people don't have to make an effort?
My prejudice isn't against people who don't speak English fluently. It's against lazy people. Someone might be hard working and disciplined and just have no interest in moving abroad or learning English - there's nothing wrong with that.
