@albertcardona And it’s especially unsustainable in the case of postgraduate research, where cost recoveries hover around 50%(?!) despite high international fees and a staggeringly high proportion of international recruits.

Lots of reasons for this, but the UK has one of the lowest levels of public investment in higher education in the world and very high levels of reliance on student fee income (Source: OECD).

In the case of postgraduate research part of the problem is that UKRI will only pay a home fee for PGRs on government studentships (despite insisting we also recruit internationally) and the level they will pay institutions is much lower than even a taught home postgraduate fee (and is a de facto cap on home PGR fees). Not exactly a recipe for funding future talent. Recoveries even for UKRI-funded PGRs don’t each 80%…

Universities therefore treat PGR as an essential investment, but one which is in effect cross-subsidised by international taught postgraduate recruitment.

I am relieved to say that despite all this most of our PGRs seem relatively content with many aspects of their time with us (according to both the PRES and International Student Barometer). A lot of effort goes into that. And we don’t tend to use agents for PGR recruitment.