Universities might look to ban country-specific student societies to ensure that international students integrate with their British counterparts, it has been suggested.

Paul White, pro vice-chancellor for learning and teaching at the University of Sheffield, told a conference that although it might be ¡°social engineering¡±, such action could build bridges between different groups.

At City College in Thessaloniki, Greece, an ¡°international faculty¡± of Sheffield that offers the university¡¯s degrees, national student societies are banned, Professor White told a Westminster Higher Education Forum conference on internationalisation in London.

¡°They want all the students from the Balkan region not to feel they are Serbs or Kosovans or Macedonians¡­It¡¯s an interesting idea; I¡¯m just throwing it out there as one example¡±, he said, of policies that could promote integration.

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Universities were generally successful in helping their students to form friendship groups while studying, he argued.

¡°The problem is that in doing so we may create closed communities of students who don¡¯t interact with each other,¡± he said, adding that Chinese, Indian and British students often stayed in their own groups.

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Institutions should get these communities to mingle, and ¡°that takes us into the realm of social engineering to an extent¡±, Professor White told the event on 21 March.

¡°There are simple things we can do by not allowing students just to choose their own class groups and also to put them into mixed communities¡± when distributing accommodation, he added.

He also questioned how many British or international students wanted to broaden their cultural horizons. Some of the latter group ¡°don¡¯t really want to get the true international experience. They want to extract the knowledge dissemination of the institution,¡± he said.

Meanwhile, Alex Bols, executive director of the 1994 Group of small, research-intensive universities, suggested that overseas students may end up isolated because they often arrive a week earlier than UK peers and so form their first friendships with other international students.

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david.matthews@tsleducation.com