Universities 'using foreign students as cash cows'

Universities and successive governments have “turned a blind eye” to the recruitment of under-qualified students for years to drive up funding levels, according to Professor Susan Bassnett. The scholar suggested that the abuse of the student visa system at London Metropolitan University was rife at other institutions across Britain, writes Graeme Paton for The Telegraph.

In a startlingly frank admission, she claimed to have encountered cases of academics “earning tidy little sums on the side by assisting students with inadequate command of English to produce essays”.

Bassnett, a former pro-vice chancellor of Warwick University, who has also acted as an external examiner at other institutions, said she had been asked to "disregard linguistic competence and focus on content" by some of her peers. Some students she crossed had such poor standards of English that they “wouldn’t scrape a GCSE”, she said.
Full report on The Telegraph site