The U-turn universities wanted – over overseas students – never came

By Natalie Gil. Academics sexed up their research; ministers played with the rules over student numbers, and tuition fees continued to cause concern – both for students and universities. This was supposed to be the year to find out what happens when you radically tinker with the English higher education system. It was as though a group of policy boffins had spent previous years setting up fiendishly clever experiments – £9,000 tuition fees, uncapping the number of students with top A-level grades that universities can recruit, the new Research Excellence Framework for distributing research money – and were now donning protective goggles ready to see what emerged from the petri dish. More...