Education is a word made more famous by Tony Blair than any other Prime Minister. It now seems that education is the leading sector in this country in terms of finance. A report from the British Council this week shows that the education sector in the UK is worth more to the export economy than the banking world and the automotive industry.
A huge £28 billion was earned from foreign students coming to the UK to study in higher education in 2003-4. This figure also displayed an approximate £5 billion rise from the previous year. The research, led by Dr Pamela Lenton of Sheffield University, comes in the same week that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published figures showing that the UK has fallen from third place to tenth in the table for resident population undertaking higher education. It seems our universities might be more populated with overseas students than with Brits.
The UK economy is boosted each year with a massive £2 billion from overseas students' tuition fees. The report shows that there are currently over 330,000 overseas students studying in the UK. Roughly 51,000 of these are Chinese and represent one in six of our overseas students.
There are some concerns though that the skills learnt by these overseas students, such as computing, sciences and engineering might be taught here but ultimately are of no benefit to the UK. Furthermore, an increasing number of higher education students are not even attending the courses within the UK but are being sent the work overseas on what are known as ‘transnational’ courses.
In 2001-02 the banking world raised a much smaller £19 billion in comparison to education’s £23 billion that year and the automotive industry’s £20 billion. The Chief Executive of the British Council Martin Davidson said in relation to the new figures, “Fundamentally, this report shows the shift of axis of our education system from one that operates predominantly domestically to one that operates on a truly international basis.”
The wind could easily blow in the other direction for education though. A growing number of overseas students are less than happy with the exorbitant tuition fees (on average, the total amount they are having to pay per year is roughly £15,000). Although this is good for the UK economy at present, it might become a problem when the number of UK residents seeking higher education falls and all of the overseas students return to their respective countries after graduating.
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