international students

International students have been headline news in the British media almost every day this week. The week began with an exposé by The Daily Telegraph newspaper which unveiled that foreign students are being accepted with lower grades than British students at some universities. After the backlash to this there was a plea from a government minister for overseas students to study in Britain, before the UK Border Agency insisted that the recent visa changes will not affect genuine students.

A month ago, we featured a post about a Dutch student studying in America. Tessa ten Cate had started her own blog called IntProblems.com with loads of brilliant images pointing out the common problems and differences that international students face in a new country.

She has recently moved to London and so has a whole new country to pick out the differences for. Here she describes her early experiences of the UK and shows us some of her brand new images:

"So far London has been great! Monday through Thursday every week I am in class, but on the weekends I have been exploring London as much as possible. This isn't my first time in London so I had seen the majority of the main tourist sights before, but it was great going back and taking photos of everything.

It has also been an experience getting around the city on my own this time. I have walked many places, taken the tube tons, and used the railway trains too. Of course one of the main things that has taken a while to get used to is that all traffic drives on the left and that pedestrians stay to the left as much as possible too."

There's a new face on the internet who is taking the student blogging world by storm. IntProblems.com has a selection of brilliant images pointing out the common problems and differences that international students face in a new country (just like the ones above). It seems other foreign students can relate to the amusing observations and every new post is being reblogged around the world, with the online community growing all the time.

After spotting the blog, we had to know who was behind it, and discovered 20-year-old Boston University student Tessa ten Cate. We spoke to Tessa to find out her background and why she created IntProblems.com.

Where do you think the best city to study is? Are certain places a student's paradise and others a student's hell? Well, a new survey hoping to answer those questions has placed London as the second best city in the world for students. Only Paris beat the UK capital after cities were judged on affordability, quality of life and the number and reputation of their universities.

Higher Education organisation QS carried out the survey predominantly with international students in mind, with hundreds of thousands currently considering where to study. Over 500 cities were considered, with anywhere with a population of over 250,000 and at least two universities qualifying.

The sheer number of London's top quality universities (think Imperial, UCL, King's, SOAS) gave it the edge over Paris, but the city was let down by being far more expensive than the French capital. Whilst international students in London will expect to pay up to £20,000 each year in tuition fees, that figure drops to just £1,000 at Paris universities. Ben Sowter, the lead researcher, explained:

Over the last six months there have been several incidents that from the outside could suggest international students are no longer welcome in the UK. First there was the Malaysian student Ashraf Haziq who was the victim of one of the most shocking videos to come out of the London riots (pictured above).

More recently there was the tragic murder of Indian student Anuj Bivde in Manchester on Boxing Day. Similarly, though clearly on a lesser scale, there was the symptomatic story that came out of Plymouth last week of shop keepers banning foreign students from entering in groups.

On top of this, there is currently the perceived notion that the British government is trying to make it harder for international students to gain entry to the UK with the introduction of harsher visa laws. This and the recent incidents together make it easy to assume that there is a growing trend in Britain against international students.