As loud as this headline from Education Guardian shouts it is ‘true’. How I wish my mates that I have time and again raised this issue with will read this and purge themselves of the illusions that pervades their thinking that what we are being given here is the best.

I stand to be corrected and not only that I will keep telling whoever cares to listen that we are being short-changed in this country in comparison to the outrageous amount we pay as fees to study here. A typical overseas student tuition is 3:1, simply; with my fees, 3 UK and EU students can been sent to school.

This revelation serves as a wake-up call to everyone out there that thinks, we are being given the best; and to those employers in Nigeria that are lately preferring foreign graduates to home grown ones. The difference may not be clear after all.

READ, THINK and ANSWER this! Is our Talent Being Wasted?

Universities should do more to integrate international students into British undergraduate life and stop wasting their talents, according to the chief executive of the Council for Industry and Higher Education.Ahead of a major two-day conference on internationalising higher education, Richard Brown, the CIHE’s chief executive, told EducationGuardian.co.uk that universities should encourage all students to work together so they develop greater awareness of global issues.

“All students must have the opportunity to work together in multi-cultural teams, addressing real global problems in the curriculum, not solving traffic problems in Sloane Square or the M25,” he said.

According to a report on making UK HE more international to be unveiled at the conference, overseas students tend to work in ‘ghettos’ but they can bring a wide range of experiences to bear on global issues, Mr Brown said.

This is a criticism of business schools in particular, where the experiences and perspectives of Chinese students are wasted, the CIHE’s report found. They should be integrated into group work, possibly through universities “socially engineering” them by giving extra marks to “multi-cultural” teams.

The CIHE wants to make UK graduates more globally aware and attuned to different countries and cultures so they are more attractive to major employers. If overseas students participate in a more internationally focused curriculum, it creates a “different type of student” than those who study in an Anglo-Saxon way, Mr Brown said.

“Universities should really take the lead on that in that 50% of the population go through university - here’s a fantastic opportunity to make them think globally. What would be wonderful is if more of our institutions could send students on short courses overseas in places like Israel, the Arab world and Asia.

“Warwick University has a ‘world week’ where different cultures put on events each day. There are ways in which universities can be a window on the world for communities as well as students,” he said.

According to a survey by the International Graduate Insight Group, which will be unveiled at the conference, one of the main criticisms international students made of UK higher education was the lack of links with major international employers.

“That’s still where we’re not very good and international students don’t feel they have been given a sufficient leg up the ladder of employment, which suggests universities need to do more to link with international business,” Mr Brown said.

“We need to get more employers working on campus and companies recruiting the brightest and best students that come to the UK - the type of people that international companies should be recruiting and only some of them are starting to realise this.

He wants the UK to be the preferred worldwide location for all international students and postgraduates, which he says is a real opportunity for UK universities at undergraduate level.

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