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LONDON, ENGLAND, March 11, 2004: Foreign undergraduates, particularly Asian students, will outnumber their British peers at Oxford under proposals for a historic shift in the university’s role to safeguard its world-class status. According to plans drawn up by the university’s Governing Council, the British undergraduates will lose out to foreign undergraduates paying the full cost of their degree courses and to postgraduates whose numbers would double to boost Oxford’s income. The plans, set out in strategy documents, would recast Oxford along with the lines of an American-style Ivy League university, concentrating on the lucrative post-graduate market. Papers circulated to academics suggest that the number of home students should be cut from this September by one percentage point a year over the next five years to create more places for foreign undergraduates. This would take place within a freeze on the overall numbers of undergraduates while Oxford mounted an aggressive expansion of postgraduate provision. According to a spokeswoman of the University, Oxford lost US$4,700 pounds on each of its home and European Union undergraduates every year.

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