OXFORD, England, Jan. 25 (UPI) -- England's cash-strapped Oxford University will bump spaces for British students to beef up more lucrative foreign enrollment, The Times of London said Tuesday.
The proposals will cut undergraduate numbers from just over 11,000 to about 10,000 within five years, the smallest total since 1992. More slots will go to foreign students, who pay the full cost of their degrees and graduate students will be used to teach courses so academics can concentrate on research.
The school plans to mount a recruitment campaign to raise the proportion of international students from 8 percent to 15 percent of undergraduates within a decade. The result will be a loss of about 1,600 slots for British undergraduates.
In a strategy paper, the university admitted it was surviving on profits from the Oxford University Press, which covered an annual $35 million deficit in operating costs.
The paper calculated the average British undergraduate costs $35,000 per year to educate, but the university receives only $17,500 in government funding.
