Lord Patten of Barnes will lead an attempt by Oxford University to recruit India’s brightest students in direct competition with Ivy League rivals in the United States.
The university’s Chancellor will visit India next month in an attempt to dispel the university’s “conservative, stuffy image”. Lord Patten, a former European Commissioner and Governor of Hong Kong, said last night that serious universities needed a coherent strategy for recruiting students from India and China.
There are about 17,000 Indian students in Britain compared with nearly 80,000 in the United States, where leading colleges are better funded than their British equivalents.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Lord Patten said: “We have to fight very hard to keep our position in the world league table, to stay up there with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT.
“One of the problems in India is that we have a rather conservative, stuffy image. People don’t realise the flexibility and modernity of our courses. We’re falling further and further behind the United States.”