“If all you’re doing is churning out students that can’t actually communicate, can’t do the job that they are required to do, or if you’ve got incredibly high fail rates, this will drive you down in the QS rankings,” according to Susan Kinnear, dean of education and student experience at the University of Dundee.
Taking this approach “puts you in effect into a death spiral because you then can’t attract further international students”, she warned.
“If you’re spending all of your money very simply on attracting students that you don’t then retain, you are wasting resources, you’re not increasing your revenue,” she told delegates at the IELTS open day in Manchester earlier this month.
At the event, Kinnear and other colleagues researching English language testing for admissions purposes presented findings looking at the differences in testing priorities for different professions – including academics and those working in university recruitment.
While academics tend to favour tests that are perceived to be more rigorous to ensure students will be able to keep up, recruiters have to contend with ambitious international recruitment targets.
The research found that priorities were “very, very different indeed” between professions – with institutions’ focus on hitting international recruitment targets at times coming at the cost of students’ language skills, Kinnear said.
“What we’re actually seeing is a focus on recruitment, which excludes a focus on reputation and excludes a focus on student experience,” she noted. “From a university policy setting model, that’s a really siloed way of understanding.”
As well as risking institutional reputations, international students’ mental health can be damaged if they are accepted onto a program for which they are not equipped simply because their language skills are not quite good enough, delegates heard.
What we’re actually seeing is a focus on recruitment, which excludes a focus on reputation and excludes a focus on student experience
Susan Kinnear, University of Dundee
Kinnear posited that the sector must think “in a much more holistic way around how we deal with all of these different testing regimes and what they do for us” – as well as making sure that recruitment is carried out in a “more balanced fashion”.
“We cannot at university policy level focus only on the lowest possible score,” she warned.
“We have to be thinking about what support we need to put in for these various different tests and students coming in by the various different mechanisms.”
Speaking on the same panel, acting director of the Language Centre at the University of Cambridge, Karen Ottewell, pointed out that the research comes at a time when international students’ language skills are already under scrutiny.
At the end of 2024, the BBC ran an investigation into the English language proficiency that alleged it is an “open secret” that international students – due to the higher fees they are charged – can easily enrol onto UK university programs despite inadequate language skills.
Ottewell also pointed to the UK government’s plans to introduce a major shake-up of the Secure English Language Test (SELT) model.
Under the Home Office English Language Test (HOELT), the model would be split into two parts wherein one supplier would create the Home Office-branded test and another would be responsible for facilitating the tests worldwide.
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