Coventry University has become one of the most successful modern institutions in Britain. It owes much of this success to its international outlook, attracting a high number of overseas students and sending many in the opposite direction to experience higher education abroad.
Students can be based in Coventry, or at its campuses in Scarborough and London, and it has numerous links with foreign universities. Fees for overseas students are half those charged at Russell Group universities, and little more than the £9,000 a year paid by English undergraduates.
Godwin Ogbu, 24, from Nigeria, has just finished a master’s in International Relations, after completing a four-year political science course in his home country. The one-year course cost him nearly £11,000. Of his 20 fellow students, one was British. The rest were from Ghana, Azerbaijan, Romania, Russia, Congo and Kenya. He said:
I’d like to be a diplomat and there are a lot of networks in the UK. I’m enjoying the multicultural experience. I have four months to look for work or I will leave.
Dr David Pilsbury, Coventry’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor for International Development, said:
Overseas students bring financial and social capital. Our whole purpose is to be imaginative and accommodate change and the sector has done this admirably. The position of the UK sector is that these students contribute massively, intellectually and financially, and leave afterwards. There seems to be a difference of view about the extent to which people leave.
Students can be based in Coventry, or at its campuses in Scarborough and London, and it has numerous links with foreign universities
Extract from The Times, written by Paul Rogers