OVERSEAS STUDENTS IN THE UNITED-KINGDOM UNIVERSITY SYSTEM

This paper is in two main sections. The first offers a brief historical account of the involvement of overseas students in the UK University system; the second reviews the literature on student attitudes to their stay, relating this to the contemporary experiences of a small cohort of students on a postgraduate professional training course in an older university. While overseas students have traditionally been perceived as somewhat problematic, more recently, driven by economic, political and intellectual considerations, the mode of analysis has moved away from situating the cause of any problems in the students themselves, and towards exploring the relations between the needs of overseas students and the resources dedicated by universities to meeting them. Unless universities take seriously the implications of having overseas students, which include organisational and staff development issues as well as the proper adaptation of teaching methods and techniques, there is serious potential for things to go wrong.