‘If you can take the lift, why go through the hardest route?’ a recruitment officer representing four Russell Group universities asked an undercover reporter for the Sunday Times. He boasted that ‘foundation’ course pathways onto undergraduate courses at Russell Group universities are much easier than the entry requirements for British applicants: overseas applicants ‘pay more money […] so they give leeway for international students […] It’s not something they want to tell you, but it’s the truth.’

And how. The paper reports that ‘overseas students wishing to study an economics degree using one of the pathways needed grades of CCC at Bristol; CCD at Durham; DDE at Exeter; DDE at Newcastle; and just a single D at Leeds. Yet the same universities’ A-level entry requirements for UK students is A*AA or AAA.’ Odd, isn’t it, when we’re making such a noise about immigration policy favouring only the cream of international talent that we seem to be applying the opposite metric when it comes to university admissions. I don’t think it makes you a little Englander to find it perverse that it’s much harder for British than foreign students to get a place in a British university.

Britain’s higher education sector has, historically, been something to be proud of

These universities have been quick to pooh-pooh the Sunday Times’s reporting – which, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, ‘they would, wouldn’t they?’ They say that it can’t possibly be the case that foreign students are ‘squeezing out’ domestic applicants because, look, domestic admissions to Russell Group universities are at a record high and foreign applications have slumped. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re right about this. I would be surprised, though, if that trend was privately regarded by the average vice-chancellor with anything but horror. There’s a reason they spend millions pimping themselves abroad.

If there’s a temporary shortage of foreign students, in other words, it’s not for want of trying. The slump in foreign students, particularly from the EU, is down to that awkwardness in 2016. That and the fact our general enthusiasm for making it harder for foreigners to live here may yet put a dent in the flow of Indian and Chinese money. This will cook the universities’ gooses yet further. The way university funding is now set up means that all but a very few universities positively rely on foreigners to pay the bills.

The universities further complain that the Sunday Times failed to differentiate between the traditional, front-door admission system via UCAS and the one-year ‘foundation’ courses offered to foreign students. It seems to me that the paper differentiated between them rather well: it made the point that getting into the latter, more or less, requires the offspring of your average Chinese billionaire to be able to make a smudge on a bit of paper with his thumb, whereas the former asks a native Briton to get a clutch of A*s at A-level. They grumble that this is not comparing like with like… but that’s sort of the point.

Sure, a foundation course doesn’t guarantee a straight-C student will go on to join the regular undergraduate course the following year alongside higher-achieving British peers. But the paper found all sorts of people prepared to testify that the end-of-year exams needed to get you through aren’t especially taxing. Pass rates of between 93 and 100 per cent were reported. So the back door does, to all intents and purposes, exist.

And why on earth wouldn’t it? Vice-chancellors are encouraged to run universities as businesses, and businesses tend to look for profit. If student fees for Britons are capped at a quarter of what you can charge a foreigner, you’re going to do everything you can to get some wealthy foreigners in through the door before you go bust.

There are two models of what a university education is for, and they have always jostled along together. One is the humanistic, perhaps slightly hippy-dippy notion that learning is in and of itself a good thing: that it benefits both the individual human and the common lot of humanity, on average, to have minds expanded and assumptions tested. This is the version that thinks that the Greats are great, that studying poems for three years partially or wholly on the taxpayer’s dime is just the sort of thing a civilised society should encourage, and that universities are the engines of our commonwealth of knowledge.

Then there’s the instrumental version, which is that learning is a good thing because it increases your human capital, creates the sort of people who will power a high-skill economy, boosts the graduate’s expected lifetime earnings by a measurable amount, and all in all keeps the wheels of industry whizzing merrily round. This is the version, increasingly favoured by government these last few decades, which wants to see a return on investment one way or another. It wants its students to cover their bills; and it wants, with a view to boosting the wider economy, to encourage the sorts of students who go on to become engineers or tech wizards rather than poets. (There is, of course, a third model of what a university education is for, favoured by many undergraduates back when it was free, which had to do with getting blootered and trying to shag people, but that need not detain us overmuch here.)

As I say, these models have always jostled along together. The balance has shifted dramatically to the latter lately, with times being tough and Wordsworth looking more optional. But there’s always been a sense that universities do both things at once. I’m not sure if the current funding situation continues, though, that they are likely to be able to do either for much longer.

The trend is towards a larger number of foreign students, and a larger number of students tout court. As Kingsley Amis said, ‘More will mean worse.’ If, as the Sunday Times suggests, they aren’t starting on an even academic footing with their British fellows, teaching wealthy but derr-brained foreign students will slow the progress of the brighter kids. One lecturer told the paper: ‘They might struggle to keep up on the courses, especially with the written work, and this can mean more work for me and a slower pace for the rest of the students in the class.’

Even if these foreign cash-cows aren’t actively displacing domestic students, they are unlikely to stick around – and will become ever more unlikely to as we make it harder for foreign graduates to live and work here. In effect, they’ll swoop in, enjoy the cachet of an elite education, and then repatriate their human capital smartly to their countries of origin or to the international job market. The national circulatory system of scholarship – where the smartest graduates either boost the UK economy by working here or refresh the lifeblood of British academia with postgraduate work – will have sprung a leak. Or, perhaps, invited a vampire across the threshold.

Britain’s higher education sector has, historically, been something to be proud of. The fact that all these foreigners still want to study here is testament to that. But if its short-to-medium-term survival strategy is to lower its standards and change its demographic, which over time will diminish its attraction to foreign students in the first place, there may not be a long term.