UK Universities Urged to Improve Support for Chinese Students Amid Integration Concerns

Researchers are calling on UK universities to do more for Chinese students in order to better integrate them into their own campus, with rising concerns of “ethnic clustering” and inadequate community involvement.

Chinese students form the largest group of international students in the UK, and these students bring into the country a total of £2.3 billion in tuition fees every year. According to a recent report by the Higher Education Policy Institute, however, Chinese students have different challenges, and vice-chancellors are being called upon to do more to put things right. The report warns that many Chinese students feel treated as revenue streams rather than valued members of the academic community.

Some of the problems have been identified as isolation due to lack of fluency in spoken English by some Chinese students. Moreover, using different social media platforms such as WeChat and Little Red Book rather than the UK’s preferred apps such as WhatsApp and Instagram has isolated them further and increased ethnic clustering. These students usually stay within their circles and are less likely to interact with domestic or international students from other backgrounds.

The report draws on interviews with 100 students in 20 institutions. It relates how frustrated Chinese students have been with universities’ inability to grasp their specific needs. The lack of support of such needs, along with the struggling economy of China, might lower the influx of Chinese students coming to the UK to pursue higher education. Recent data by UCAS shows that the number of accepted undergraduate courses dropped by 7.7% within the last two years, from 18,500 in 2022 to 17,070 in 2024.

To address these challenges, the HEPI report suggests a buddy system to pair domestic students with Chinese students to foster better integration. It also calls for targeted career support to help Chinese students find post-study employment in the UK.

Pippa Ebel, author of the report said that support for Chinese students would help not only them but the campuses and society at large. Universities UK, who are representatives of over 140 institutions, pointed out that while international students are significant, universities are well-able to deal with the problems that a global student market imposes on it.