Funding for EU students soars by £50m in two years

By Graeme Paton. The amount of taxpayers’ money spent educating students from mainland Europe at English universities has soared by £50m in just two years, figures show.  Data released by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills shows that an estimated £360m in funding was handed to institutions last year to tutor EU undergraduates.
It was also revealed students from outside Britain took out some £88.5m worth of Government-backed loans to cover tuition fees in 2010/11 – a doubling of the total over three years. It comes despite the fact that some European students currently fail to make repayments after graduating – leaving a multi-million pound black-hole in the public finances.
The findings prompted fresh concerns that Europeans were accounting for an increasingly large share of the universities’ budget at a time of cutbacks across the higher education sector. It was also claimed a rise in the number of students from outside Britain was creating extra competition for places at the most sought-after universities. More...