The reception desk is festooned with posters and flyers for local events and London shows. The paintwork gleams, the bedrooms are spacious, the kitchens and bathrooms high-end. Around the corner are classrooms and a lecture theatre, and in every nook and cranny students are chatting, working and reading.

This newly-opened four-storey building is on-campus home and school to around 400 students at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, all of them from outside the European Union. It was paid for and built by INTO University, a private company that markets UEA's courses and recruits students overseas. INTO hires the teachers, runs lessons, exams and social events, and guarantees the university a minimum number of students each year; UEA decides on course content and has final say over which students have made enough progress to be allowed into its standard degree courses. Profits are shared equally.

Students from outside the EU are vital to British universities' finances. Neither their numbers nor their fees are capped by government (UEA's foreign-student fees, around £10,000 a year for most courses, are pretty standard; nationally, fees paid by overseas students in higher education total some £2.5 billion). They keep open departments in some subjects-science, engineering-that are shunned by locals. And the more of them a university attracts, the higher it rises in the ever-more-important international league tables.

Britain has been a magnet for foreign students, thanks in part to the reflected glory of Oxford and Cambridge and to the fact that English is the global language of business. But its attraction may be weakening. Too often universities offer their paying guests a shoddy service. A common gripe is that they provide little customised support in return for their whopping fees; language problems and social isolation are rife. Locals, too, can resent foreign students, particularly if large groups come from a single place and don't mix, or if their poor English holds up a whole class, or if there is any hint that they are admitted preferentially for financial reasons.

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