What are universities for? Different decades have thrown out different answers: the pursuit of truth, to train an elite, to grow the national economy, to promote social mobility. With news that Britain’s leading universities now get most of their fee income from foreign students, this decade’s answer is clear: universities are businesses.
A cash-strapped higher education sector has increased the number of foreign students by 50 per cent in five years. One in every four students is from overseas. In one sense this focus on international students is understandable: they pay up to three times as much as their UK peers for the same educational experience. But it has fundamentally transformed higher education. When elite institutions recruit from abroad, they make it harder for British
