BRITISH undergraduates will represent a minority of students at Oxford under proposals for an historic shift in the university’s role to safeguard its world-class status.

They will lose out to foreign undergraduates paying the full cost of their degree courses and to postgraduates whose numbers would double to boost Oxford’s income.

The plans, set out in strategy documents drawn up by the university’s governing council, would recast Oxford along the lines of an American-style Ivy League university, concentrating on the lucrative postgraduate market.

Papers circulated to academics suggest that the number of home students should be cut from this September by one percentage point a year over the next five years to create more places for foreign undergraduates. This would take place within a freeze on the overall numbers of undergraduates while Oxford mounted an aggressive expansion of postgraduate provision.

A university spokeswoman said that Oxford lost £2,600 on each of its home and EU undergraduates every year. EU students pay the same fees as those from Britain. The loss would still be £700 per year, even after the Government permitted annual tuition fees to rise to £3,000 from 2006.

“Clearly, we don’t lose on full-fee-paying students in the way that we lose on home and EU students,” the spokes-woman said. “From the profile of students applying to us, the quality of students from overseas is rising.

“We are not going to increase the total undergraduate numbers in a situation where this is a loss-making activity for us. If there are more able foreign undergraduates, it will mean less places for home and EU students.”

Foreign students at Oxford pay between £8,170 and £20,000 a year for their degrees, plus annual college fees of about £4,000. Postgraduates pay the same amounts, while British postgraduates are charged up to £2,940.

A paper setting out Oxford’s longer-term development strategy suggests that postgraduate numbers would equal those of undergraduates by 2016 and surpass them by 2020. It would be the first time in Oxford’s history that undergraduates formed a minority of the student body.

Oxford has about 11,000 undergraduates at present, 90 per cent of whom are British. A cut of one percentage point a year would mean between 500 and 600 fewer home students being admitted by 2009.

The proposals go on to state that Oxford expected to have “a large minority of undergraduates from outside the UK and the European Union” by 2020.

About 5,200 students are engaged in postgraduate study. The documents obtained by The Times Higher Education Supplement show that Oxford intends to increase total student numbers by 2 percentage points a year through postgraduate recruitment alone until 2009.

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