In the 2023/24 academic year, Trinity registered 1,200 new first-year students in its Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS). It also registered 1,025 visiting students in the same faculty that year. While this might be a surprising statistic on paper, it is likely not much of a shock for humanities students at Trinity, who are used to seeing their classes increasingly populated with students on Erasmus, exchange and other study abroad programs from the EU and beyond.
The presence of visiting students, of course, is not in itself a problem. Far from it — by participating in Erasmus and exchange programs with other universities across the world, Trinity diversifies its student population and perspectives on campus, and creates important and enriching opportunities for its own students. However, as the Senior Lecturer’s latest Annual Report on undergraduate studies reveals, the proportion of Trinity’s visiting student population (the vast majority of whom are in AHSS) places it on the highest end of European universities, and this has a significant impact on an institution whose academic and student support systems were not designed with such exchanges in mind.
Trinity’s visiting students make up about 10 per cent of its undergraduate population; by comparison, Oxford, Sorbonne, Heidelberg University and the University of Bologna record about half that or less. The rate of visiting students at the University of Edinburgh, for one, is similar to ours. However, where Edinburgh has subject-based enrolment requirements across the board, Trinity lacks a consistent pre-requisite system. Visiting students in Edinburgh’s AHSS departments are required to have completed introductory classes in their subject before enrolling in second- or third-year modules; in Trinity, this is true for many political science modules, for instance, but not in the Schools of English or History, which see a high rate of visiting students but list no pre-requisites for practically all their modules.
The massive number of visiting students in these departments — the School of English alone saw over 200 last academic year — can therefore disrupt an otherwise fixed module progression. In the first two years of their course, English students at Trinity take the same set modules prescribed to them, roughly working their way from Old English through Shakespeare, Victorian literature into contemporary and postcolonial literature. The course is designed with this system in mind, giving students a shared foundation that informs class discussions and expectations. Allowing visiting students to take these courses haphazardly can thus place both them and other students at a disadvantage. Moreover, though visiting students are usually at least third years, Trinity requiring them to have already completed two years of study at their home institutions, many enrol in fresher modules, which can create other misalignments. That the marks visiting students receive here often don’t influence their final degree or GPAs back home can also create disparities in student preparation and approach in Sophister classes.
These academic concerns do not even take into consideration issues of wider resources in the College, which a high visiting-student rate exacerbates. Trinity cannot guarantee accommodation for all its full-degree students; yet its limited rooms on campus and at third-party accommodation provider partners must, in addition, be distributed amongst hundreds of international exchange students. The known lack of college accommodation is also unfair on EU Erasmus students, who are not even eligible for Trinity’s college accommodation and must sort out their own housing from afar (many participating European universities, on the other hand, do provide accommodation for incoming Erasmus students). This is not even to mention other resources such as Student Counselling Services and the Academic Registry, which in Trinity are notoriously already inefficient and/or strained.
We repeat that exchange programs in principle can and should be enriching and mind-broadening experiences on both sides. However, if Trinity wants to position itself as a major hub for visiting students across the world, as part of its stated strategy to diversify its international student body, it is unfair on all ends to do so without adequate preparation. Instead, the College must carefully assess the specific academic and social impacts that this occasions for its visiting and full-degree students, and ensure it first has the systems and resources in place to do justice to both.
