Funding crisis forces Oxford to cut British student places

1.  OXFORD University is planning to cut hundreds of places for British undergraduates and increase those for foreign students as it aims to stem chronic losses that threaten its world-class status.

2.  More places will go to foreign students, who pay the full cost of their degrees, and cheaper graduate students will be used to teach courses so that academics can concentrate on research.

3.  Oxford will also mount a vigorous recruitment campaign to raise the proportion of international students from 8 per cent to 15 per cent of undergraduates within a decade.

4.  With the Government ruling out further increases until 2010 at the earliest, institutions must seek to cut losses on British undergraduates if they are to keep up with leading universities in the United States.

5.  The strategy paper acknowledged that frustration at Oxford over constraints imposed by government had led to calls for privatisation of the university so that it could set its own fees.