Ineligible Foreign Students Receive $8.5Mln in Loans: UK Audit Office

Ineligible foreign students received 5.4 million pounds ($8.5 million) in loans from the British government, which has only been able to recover only 7 percent of this money, a report revealed.

MOSCOW, December 2 (Sputnik) – Thousands of undergraduates enrolled in the new private higher education colleges in the United Kingdom are not registered to take exams, but are still claiming financial support, a report published Tuesday by the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed.

The report by the government spending watchdog states that Students Loan Company, an organization that provides student loans in the United Kingdom, established that up until October 2014, ineligible foreign students received 5.4 million pounds ($8.5 million) in loans from the British government, which has only been able to recover only 7 percent of this money.

The report also uncovered that the dropout rate at alternative higher education establishments was over 20 percent, five times higher than in the rest of the education sector.

Many alternative colleges were found to accept students who "do not have previous qualifications but can demonstrate work experience." The English language requirements were considered to be low, with almost half of 23 colleges investigated only asking for "partial command" of English to be able to enroll.

Fifty percent of EU students applying to study at British universities did not provide evidence that they were eligible for financial support. Of those, 83 percent were applying to alternative education providers, according to the results of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, the NAO report says. Approximately 40 percent of publicly-funded students in those establishments are from outside the United Kingdom, as opposed to 6 percent in traditional universities.