Chinese students pay about three-quarters of all taught postgraduate tuition fee income at some leading UK universities, according to new estimates that are likely to heighten concern about the sector’s over-reliance on Beijing. The analysis combines Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) data on enrolments, excluding Scotland, with fee income estimates from databases held by Times Higher Education. At an institutional level, it found that many of the country’s top research-intensive universities had become two or even three times more dependent on Chinese students’ tuition fees over this period. They were associated with 40 per cent of total fee income at UCL in 2021-22 – up from just 14 per cent seven years previously. With domestic tuition fees frozen, leading universities have increasingly turned to international students to plug holes in their finances.
