Me too! I usually get pretty obsessed with a new topic out of deep curiosity. I then dive deep, think about it a lot, hunt down answers to burning questions. At some point this’ll fade and then I feel like I know enough.
Yes I’d agree with that. International student income dropped, rounds of layoffs.
Some universities are better at optimising for rankings, see also REF research funding and how much effort and resources are spent on it, which varies by university: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/
How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?
I’m not sure where you’ve got the stats from, but student visas granted dropped since 2022, acc to UK gov (-5% in 2023, -14% in 2024).[0]
Combined with universities' increasing reliance on international student income (over the last years) and issues accessing research funding, this can get universities into trouble.
Because universities borrowed staggering amounts of money and hired massive numbers of people.
The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government and university administrators it just seemed unlimited because there are no limits to resources, dangerous).
Don't forget that the Universities focused on getting foreign students and cashing in instead of providing valuable education.
The quality of teaching is non-existent. It's about giving foreign parents ability to tell their peers look my brilliant child is studying in England! But really they are not studying. Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.
I TA’ed a course at my state university a few years back. We had some program that attracted hundreds of students from the UAE. Many were obviously from wealthy families and drove Mercedes and BMWs, etc.
The amount of cheating on exams and complete lack of effort on studying by the vast majority (+80%) was astounding. We were essentially hand feeding them to get them to learn the material.
The professor was very frustrated but (I presume) was told you can’t come down hard on them. They were obviously a huge income source for the university.
Reason #53 why modern university has basically become a scam.
This is such garbage. The only reason universities focused on getting foreign students is because the introduction of fees that don't increase with inflation means they are all slowly going bankrupt.
The funding squeeze is real, but that’s not the whole story. Universities didn’t have to turn into diploma/visa mills - they chose to. Instead of protecting standards, they pivoted to a business model of brand-selling: recruiting overseas students at inflated rates and cutting corners on teaching.
Domestic students end up with debt for degrees that deliver little value, often taught by underqualified lecturers. Those who complain get brushed off or quietly bought out with NDA-style settlements. Foreign students mostly keep quiet because openly questioning standards would devalue their own diploma.
So yes, funding cuts mattered - but the bigger scandal is how universities responded. They saw the “golden years” were over and decided to milk the brand, not safeguard education.
Actually, the Home Office / UKVI does require universities sponsoring international students to monitor attendance and engagement, and to report non-attendance. This has prompted many universities to formalise attendance tracking (barcode check-ins, attendance apps etc.), especially for visa-holding students. Whether they actually do it, is another question.
Yes, but it is not till quite recently that this implied formal attendance tracking of student attendance at individual lectures. For example, here is how UCL interpreted the requirements as recently as 2015:
The big fall in income is nothing to do with Brexit, and it's worth saying that international students from within the EU paid the same as home students pre-Brexit.
What happened was a massive expansion to non-EU students paying the larger uncapped fees because of an expansion of student visas to allow (a) dependents to come (b) a route to staying in the UK. It led to over a million immigrants in one year, was massively criticised politically, and so got scrapped. There's no a lot of arguing that we should as a country remove/change the Indefinite Leave to Remain route because those graduates (and dependents) are from January starting to be eligible to apply and stay permanently.
explain how he (a private citizen) can give a 90 day extension on a deadline that is passed with criteria that can not be certified and had to have been already given to congress? Please be precise with terminology and facts in these legal matters.
He's not just any private citizen, he's the president elect who will be inaugurated in a day. I'm sure his word carries way more weight than mine.
I'm not privy to the specific words that were exchanged, so it's hard to be precise. But I imagine it was some form of Trump saying "by tomorrow, I will give you a 90-day extension. I have a gentleman's agreement with the current government that if you do not stop your services in the 24 hours between now and my inauguration, you won't face any issues, so please carry on and we will clean this mess up later".
If you want a private citizen analogy, it's similar to someone saying they won't press charges despite a third-party being in flagrant illegal behavior. In this case, it's the US government saying they won't press charges. Both Biden and Trump have said as much, if my understanding of the case is correct, and one can assume they have discussed this with the appropriate branches of government.
Trump does not have the authority to give a 90 day extension by the language in the law from my understanding. There was a provision for a single use 90 day extension that would require the president to certify 3 things (which currently has not been met and can not be met within days) and have that delivered to congress prior to the ban taking affect. The law gives no mechanism to provide an extension after the ban according to republican legislators.
He must simply _claim_ that the 3 requirements have been met according to his own interpretation of the facts on the ground. It doesn't mean that his interpretation must be correct; He has the discretion to provide the extension per the law.
If someone challenges his interpretation of the 3 requirements in court, then presumably he'd have to explain why he believed that to be the case[1], but he does not have to prove this certainty ex ante in order for the 90-day extension to be valid.
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[1]: IANAL but whether he can successfully prove it or not is also ultimately irrelevant given the SCOTUS recent interpretation of presidential power. If he's found "guilty" of making a bad interpretation of the certainty of the 3 requirements, what is really going to be his punishment? There's really nothing you can do against a sitting president with regards to the exercise of their executive power...
He does not need to simply _claim_, he must certify. And one of those is:
“there are in place the relevant binding legal agreements to enable execution of such qualified divestiture during the period of such extension."
This is a binary thing. No such legal agreement seems to exist. You also ignored the other parts of my comment about him missing the deadline in the law to apply the extension.
"Certify" does not mean the same as prove with evidence. I don't think there's a specific threshold that has to be met there other than the parties agreeing it has been certified. It can even come down to as much as "trust me bro" from the president.
The definition of certify is literally "attest or confirm in a formal statement"
Besides, there's no process through which Congress would question or investigate whether the president really can or cannot certify whatever he claims about this matter.
It would be interesting if fans edited the episodes into a "contestant viewpoint only" version that removed the TV viewer's perspective and allowed viewers to play along without knowledge of the traitors.
To me, this recurring narrative of product versus engineering is both tiresome and misguided.
In well-run companies, commercial, product, and engineering teams are aligned - overused as the term may be. Any misalignment points to fundamental flaws in company culture. In my experience, this misalignment is what causes so much pain in high-growth companies that introduce managerial roles to a previously founder-led culture - not the product owner role as such.
It's counterproductive to stereotype POs as overbearing taskmasters, or to cast engineers as creators of beautiful but useless code. Such perceptions, if prevalent within a company, should be the primary issue to address. There's certainly features that POs don't enjoy working on but they have to - same for engineers (think about all those compliance features).
I believe POs can serve as a vital bridge between commercial and engineering departments. They clarify how features add customer value, explain business objectives behind projects and help decide what's next on the roadmap. Additionally, they help maintain focus by minimising abrupt directional shifts in the roadmap that could waste resources. And they can weigh in on decisions when they see that engineering teams are already strained by other projects or any business-as-usual work.
In that way, everyone is be enabled to do their best work and the PO is not reduced to the cookie cutter version the author portrays in the article.
