London: Foreign undergraduates, particularly Asian students, will outnumber their British peers at Oxford under proposals for a historic shift in the university's role to safeguard its world-class status.

According to plans drawn up by the university's governing council, the British undergraduates will lose out to foreign undergraduates paying the full cost of their degree courses and to postgraduates whose numbers would double to boost Oxford's income.

The plans, set out in strategy documents, would recast Oxford along with the lines of an American-style Ivy League university, concentrating on the lucrative post-graduate market.

Papers circulated to academics suggest that the number of home students should be cut from this September by one percentage point a year over the next five years to create more places for foreign undergraduates. This would take place within a freeze on the overall numbers of undergraduates while Oxford mounted an aggressive expansion of postgraduate provision.

According to a spokeswoman of the university, Oxford lost £ 2,600 on each of its home and European Union (EU) undergraduates every year.

EU students pay the same fees as those from Britain. The loss would still be £ 700 per year, even after the Government permitted annual tuition fees to rise to £ 3,000 from 2006.

Foreign students at Oxford pay between £ 8,170 and £ 20,000 a year for their degrees, plus annual college fees of about £ 4,000. Postgraduates pay the same amount, while British postgraduates are charged up to £ 2,940.

"Clearly, we don't lose on full-fee-paying students in the way that we lose on home and EU students," the spokeswoman said.

"From the profile of students applying to us, the quality of students from overseas is rising. We are not going to increase the total undergraduate numbers in a situation where this is a loss-making activity for us. If there are more able foreign undergraduates it will mean less places for home and EU students," she said.

Oxford has about 11,000 undergraduates at present, 90 per cent of whom are British. A cut of one percentage point a year would mean between 500 and 600 fewer home students being admitted by 2009.

According to the plans, Oxford expected to have "a large minority of undergraduates from outside the UK and the European Union" by 2020.