When Fabio Domingos, a Brazilian in his final year of a PhD in geology at Durham University, signed up for the course he did not know what to expect and had no idea where the university was.

“I hadn’t even heard of Durham before my supervisor recommended the university there,” he says. “I’m from the Amazon and I had never even left Brazil.” Domingos, 30, is not alone. Every year about 1,000 Brazilians come to the UK to study.

It was also the first time abroad for Xiao Liang, from China, who has just finished an MSc in accounting and finance at Birmingham. The 22-year-old wanted to experience a foreign culture, only to find that half the students in her class were Chinese.

“It was a little disappointing,” she says. It is not surprising, however. Overseas students make up one third of all postgraduates in the UK and the figure is often more than half at the the top universities, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. China sends the most, followed by India, America, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Many of these students are looking for a competitive edge in the jobs market at home or some, like Liang, with a UK employer. Others seestudying abroad as a chance to gain expertise to benefit their countries.

This tendency is most obvious with courses such as development studies or medicine. Alex Owusu-Ofori, a PhD student at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, says friends in Ghana asked him why he was going to a Western country to learn about tropical diseases. It has proved a great way to build on his knowledge. “But learning about them and staying here does not make sense,” he adds.

Aarij Siddiqui, from Raipur in central India, plans to return home after finishing his masters at the University of Buckingham Medical School. Coming to England, he says, has given him exposure to a higher level of medicine than is affordable in India’s public healthcare system and that will bring benefits back home. But he and others still hope to work in the UK for a couple of years to recover some of the money invested in studying.

Funding is a big issue for international students. Domingos was awarded a full scholarship by the Brazilian Ministry of Education. Jojo Quansah, who is completing an MA in marketing communications at Westminster University, won his scholarship in the British Council’s reality TV show The Challenge in Ghana. But most postgraduate students must pay for themselves.

Diana Robles has just completed an MBA at Saïd Business School, Oxford. She and her husband, who also did the course, plan to return to Columbia to help to expand a cooperative of 400 small convenience stores providing incomes for the poor. But doing the MBA has set the couple back £50,000 in tuition and living costs.

Not everyone is convinced that it is always good value to do a masters in the UK. Siddiqui says he has friends at other universities who complain of poorly structured courses and inexperienced lecturers. “You cannot assume that because you are coming to the UK you will get a first-class education,” he cautions.

However, most consider it worthwhile and some are surprised that more British people do not snap up the postgraduate opportunities.

Opeyemi Adamolekun, an Eyptian who graduate from Saïd with an MBA, says: “There seems to be more of us than the British. If your top institutions are filled with foreign students, I’m not sure what that says about the future for British students.”

Targeted grants

Most international students turn first to their home governments or the British Council for funding. However, charities and universities also provide support, often focused on particular courses or countries, Peter Davy writes.

Manchester University runs a developing country scholarships scheme covering tuition fees and living costs for students from Uganda, Rwanda and Bangladesh.

It has helped students such as Robert Lule, who took a masters in maintenance engineering and asset management. He is now back at police marine headquarters in Kampala, where he is an assistant commander and has developed a servicing programme to stop vessels worth millions of pounds from breaking down. “It has benefited us enormously because we didn’t have anyone to do this,” he says.

However, Tim Westlake, director of international development at Manchester, says he is afraid such stories give students false hope. He noted that there were about 3,000 applications last year for six scholarships for Ugandan students.

Westlake thinks more impact could come from distance learning courses enabling students to obtain a British degree without leaving home.

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