Lectures at Britain’s best universities now come with subtitles. Look around the room and you’ll see rows of students who can’t follow the English, reading it off their phones instead, getting a line-by-line translation as the professor speaks. Every student in that hall has been certified as able to understand the material in English. On this evidence, the certification is not worth a great deal. Students at several universities have described the same scene to me, each in the flat tone reserved for what no longer surprises them.
One student says he rarely sits through a lecture without noticing several classmates following it in real-time AI translation, each of them deemed to have proficient English language skills before they arrived. The apps can just about keep up in a lecture, but not during class discussions. Others describe seminars in which the conversation falls to the handful of students who have the language skills to answer in real time. Sometimes, the class cannot make itself understood to the tutor at all and, remarkably, the discussion switches to Mandarin, leaving the only home student unable to take part in a seminar at their own university. There is something almost comical in it, until you remember he was paying for the privilege.
A degree that certifies nothing eventually becomes a degree worth nothing
Students have pointed out another, still more alarming phenomenon. Classmates who struggle to hold a conversation in English often return very high marks on their essays. Some students admitted to others, cheerfully enough, that they paid professional essay-writers to complete their coursework for them. Buying an essay is academic misconduct rather than a crime; selling one has been a criminal offence in England since 2022, though you would struggle to find a prosecution. What troubles me is how ordinary it has become. Students speak of it as routine for those whose English falls short, something discussed openly rather than hidden.
None of this would have been necessary if the English language requirements for university had meant anything at the point of admission. An applicant who falls short, these days, is no longer turned away. Many top universities simply sell them a short pre-sessional English course at a fee it, conveniently, sets itself, and passing this course replaces the language test. No external examiner reviews the result. The Home Office allows providers teaching at degree level to assess English by their own methods and simply record the judgement on the visa paperwork, so nothing is checked at that stage either. Some language pathway centres advertise guaranteed progression. I find it hard not to admire the economy of it. The university sets the standard, sells the remedy, marks the remedy and keeps the fee. I know of no other market where the seller is trusted with quite this much.
As it happens, the students who lose out most are the ones who meet the requirements. A degree means something only because it separates those who earned it from those who did not. Alas, this distinction has begun to fade. A student who has spent years learning to argue in a second language now leaves with the same degree as the classmate who paid for his essays and follows lectures through translator apps. Group work offers the plainest example: students describe presentations in which the marks of the whole group are dragged down because their classmates could not speak English to the level the task required. Their grade, in effect, rests on other people’s English.
The buyers, tellingly, have noticed the slip in standards before the sellers. China sends more students to Britain than any other country. Among Chinese recruiters, the degree has earned a dismissive nickname: 水硕, or ‘water master’s’, a qualification seen as watered down and valued accordingly. The ease of admission, and what the students describe once they are in, is part of what has made Chinese families and employers wary, and the enrolments in the latest admissions cycle have begun to follow this trend. A 10 per cent slump in international applicants has forced top institutions to accept lower-achieving candidates. A reputation built over a century is being spent in a decade and, make no mistake, the cost will ultimately fall on the students.
A degree used to certify a claim about a person: that they can think critically and make themselves understood. A degree that certifies nothing eventually becomes a degree worth nothing. It will still say ‘first class’. It no longer says first class at what.
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