Top British universities have been rejecting students from the UK in favour of rich foreigners due to the fact they pay higher fees, it has been revealed.
A new investigation found that Russell Group universities were paying middlemen to hunt for wealthy overseas students who had far lower grades than those required of their British counterparts.
The Sunday Times investigation found the rich students could buy their way on to some of the best courses with as little as a handful of C grades at GCSE level.
The paper secretly filmed representatives from the group of world-class universities saying overseas students could take the “backdoor” route to get in.
In the footage one recruitment official could be heard laughing about the situation to undercover reporters, saying: “If you can take the lift, why go through the hardest route?
“International [students] pay more money and the [universities] will receive almost double, so they give leeway for international students.”
He added that the schemes were not published in the UK as British students would “not accept it” adding “it’s not something they want to tell you, but it’s the truth”.
These universities are thought to be paying millions of pounds every year for recruitment staff to attract the students who pay up to £38,000 in tuition fees while their UK counterparts are capped at £9,250.
Recruitment agents are thought to be better paid than most vice-chancellors and take about 20 percent of the fees paid by foreign students.
Adverts for the “back door” routes have been put up in the Middle East, Africa and Asia in a bid to lure students.
There are 15 Russell Group universities offering special one-year pathway courses that allow overseas students to gain access to undergraduate degrees despite having low A level and GCSE results, including Durham, Queen Mary University of London and Warwick.
Students on the pathway begin on a course to help them catch up before being put into year two of the undergraduate course after passing a test which undercover reporters were told was so easy that passing was a formality.
None of these pathways are open to British students.
The investigation found overseas students wishing to study an economics degree using one of the pathways needed grades of CCC at Bristol, CCD at Durham, DDE at Exeter, DDE at Newcastle, and just a single D at Leeds, while UK students were required to have A*AA or AAA at the same universities.
One recruitment official estimated that at least 30 percent of foreign students were gaining entry via the routes.
Sheffield University said 10,200 foreign students had gone directly into its degree courses from the special pathways in the past three years, with only one other university disclosing its figures as the rest declined to comment to the Times.
Analysis showed that students from outside the EU were performing far worse than UK students yet are more than twice as likely to receive a lower second or third-class degree.
