EU Immigrants Pretending Students Cause Misuse in UK Education Spending

MOSCOW, December 2 (Sputnik) — More than 50 mln GBP of UK taxpayers’ money were attributed to EU students, who had never undertaken a proper academic study by the ‘alternative higher education providers’, the National Audit Office (NAO), the United Kingdom’s non-aligned parliamentary watchdog, has revealed in a study released today.

The NAO has completed its investigation into the sector of cutting-edge educational institutions, so-called ‘alternative providers’, designed to commercialize higher education. The NAO report, published Tuesday, has shown that extensive access by these institutions to subsidies from public funds has led to a wider misuse of public money, as numerous foreign students, granted funding to cover tuition, never showed up at university. Most of these students come from EU member states like Romania and Bulgaria.

The NAO has determined that students, studying to obtain higher national diplomas (HNDs) or certificates (HNCs) at ‘alternative higher education providers’ received a total of 425 mln GBP of taxpayers’ money via the Student Loans Company in the 2012-2013 academic year. Having compared these data with exam records and the total dropout rate, the NAO discovered that 2,963 (20%) of the HND students never actually registered to take exams. Combined with the students expelled that same year, the total sum of wasted public funds in education amounts to 50 mln GBP, which is some 11.8% of the money allocated by the Student Loans Company. However, not all of this money was provided as grants to the would-be students, as most of it was just issued as cheap loans, to be serviced and eventually repaid.

Margaret Hodge of the House of Commons’ auditing committee spoke critically of the 2012 education reform in the light of the NAO news. The UK government, she said, “went ahead with its reforms to expand the role of private colleges without ensuring there were controls in place. This extraordinary rate of expansion, high dropout rates, and warnings from within the sector ought to have set alarm bells ringing,” Hodge concluded as quoted by the Guardian.

The NAO investigation revealed that EU students in some ‘alternative providers’ either received, or attempted to obtain support funds they were not eligible for. Moreover, the share of expelled students in private-sector higher education exceeded 20% in 2012-2013, while it is only 4% across the broader higher education sector.

The NAO also discovered that seven ‘alternative providers’ enrolled student for courses, unapproved for student support in 2012-2014, which led to the suspension of their access to public funds. However, there was also insufficient clarity on which courses were approved for student support. Two private-sector institutions, namely London School of Business and Finance, and London School of Science and Technology, have incurred a five times higher average expulsion rate due to excessive enrolment of foreign students. The study found that about 1,000 of the would-be students from Romania and Bulgaria had already obtained 5.4 mln GBP in student loans, most of which (93%) are yet to be collected.

The 2012 educational reform allowed private-sector colleges to charge students up to 6,000 GBP, which the latter could borrow from the publicly funded Student Loans Company. This situation has caused an influx of immigrants, mostly from the EU, pretending to be students eager to lay their hands on cheap financing in order to settle in the UK.

In a response to the published study, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) said that the sector of ‘alternative providers’ would receive more regulation and supervision in order to ensure the proper management of the government-provided funding. This means more bureaucratic regulation, which will inevitably cause an increase in public expenses. It is yet to determine which is better of the two evils – an 11.8% misuse of public money to indirectly support intra-EU migration, or an unidentified increase in UK fiscal pressure caused by a bloated and ever-growing regulating apparatus.