Sunday 6 August 2017

UK universities discriminate against UK students but what about non UK EU students?

This is the latest story to exercise the tiny minds of the UK  EU phile media fed chattering classes. I have been writing about this for years and been ignored so why is it now a big story?

UK universities can charge non EU students, that includes those from the Channel Islands, IOM etc much higher fees than EU students. Link it to the enormous and rapidly increasing salaries paid to Vice Chancellors, yesterday's big story and you don't have to be an Alan Sugar to see if you can extract more money from Johny Foreigner than UK students for providing the same service then you sell into the more lucrative market and make load more money for VCS. That is how VCs justify their huge salary increases. Easy peasy. Its called discriminatory pricing in the economic literature and is banned in most markets but not it seems University education.

The reporting of this 'scandal' shows UK journalism at its worst. They all, BBC included, trot out roughly the same figures. I quote from the Sunday Times, "Between 2008/09 and 2015/16 12 out of the 24 Russell Group universities cut their numbers of British undergrads at the same time as expanding non - EU undergrads" Did you notice what the ST did? I feel like the girl on the TV ad showing how to con punters into divulging their bank pin codes. They are not comparing like with like. There are no figures but one group is students British and the other is British and European students.

This lazy journalism runs throughout their piece which deals with individual university'es admissions eg Oxford British students down by 12.6%, non-EU up by 51%, Cambridge Brits down 29% non -EU up by 18%. This all against a background of an overall rise of 85000 in UK first degree applications.

If you ask about Brits vs Europeans numbers you will be fobbed off with some story that the EU forbids the collecting such divisive data. Complete bollocks.

Ask also how many non-French nationals are admitted to their Grande Ecoles especially the

École nationale d'administration


This started post war in Paris and is now in Strasbourg. It is highly selective, turns out 80 to 90 graduates a year who all go into the higher reaches of French Government and business and of course the EU commission. That's how the French play the system privilege is only for the French. who cares about fairness? Only the stupid Brits whom we will soak for as huge amount of Euros for leaving the EU.

More details on Wikepedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_nationale_d%27administration

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