British universities should stop using foreign students as a crutch

Its short-term benefits are obvious but it is not a long-term solution

This piece was originally published for The Critic in early November

There is perhaps no word that is more overused in modern political discourse than “crisis”. Taking a look at just the first page of the Google results for “UK crisis” shows we have a Channel migrant crisis, an obesity crisis, a climate crisis, a copper crisis, a prisons crisis and an energy crisis.

If the word continues to be used like this, at some point the word’s meaning will degenerate from “a time of intense difficulty or change” to “things that are happening”.

Another impending crisis is Higher Education — in particular Britain’s universities. 

The Office for Students, the regulatory body for higher education in England, has issued a warning that 40 per cent of universities and other higher education institutions are anticipated to operate at a loss this financial year. Among them, 43 institutions are projecting a deficit for the third year in a row, raising the likelihood of closures and even mergers. 

Outside of elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, financial strains have been mounting for years. This began when the Conservative-led coalition shifted university costs to graduates by tripling tuition fees for UK students in England and Wales to £9,000 per year — a decision that sparked widespread protests.

Although universities avoided the worst of public sector cuts, they were pushed into a competitive “market” for fee-paying students, gaining a level of financial independence — and responsibility — rare across Europe. Yet, despite the supposed market model, tuition fees were politically sensitive, leading the Conservative government to cap them, raising fees only once to £9,250.

With inflation surging, the real value of these fees has declined, making it increasingly unprofitable to teach UK students. In response, universities have turned to international student recruitment, where they could charge higher fees, capitalising on the UK’s strong global academic reputation. In the year ending March 2024, there were 446,924 sponsored study visas granted to main applicants. This is a dramatic increase from ten years ago, when grants were relatively stable at around 200,000 a year. International students now generate nearly as much revenue as UK students.

The reliance of universities on foreign students to support them has led to a significant change in the profile of the average international students. In its 2023 annual report, the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) noted that “data suggests the graduate route may not be attracting the expected global talent, with many students likely entering low-wage roles.” The MAC highlights several factors encouraging increased student migration, chief among them the “reliance of universities on international fees”. The MAC report also highlights that the growth in international students pursuing taught postgraduate degrees has been concentrated in institutions offering the lowest fees.

These uncapped international fees help ease financial pressures on universities, leading many, as the MAC describes, to “actively recruit students from abroad, particularly in key markets such as India and Nigeria.” Non-Russell Group universities, struggling to attract international students due to location constraints, have started to establish London campuses to increase their appeal. Last year, the “education agent” industry, which earns commissions for enrolling international students, was valued at £500 million. The University of Greenwich alone reportedly paid over £28 million to education agents for recruiting international students.

However, the government has now restricted most students from bringing dependents, sharply reducing international recruitment and worsening financial pressures on universities. The outcome is that many universities are now running significant deficits, cutting courses, academic positions, and other projects, with no clear strategy in place to address the crisis — apart, it seems, from one.

In response to the crisis, the Higher Education Policy Institute recently made recommendations on how to ensure that universities could continue to depend on immigration to prop themselves up by making recommendations on “Emerging Student Populations” to focus recruitment on.  

In a recent blog post on their website, Meti Basiri, Co-founder and CEO at ApplyBoard — an educational technology company that “simplifies the study abroad process by connecting students, recruitment partners, and partner schools on a single platform” — wrote that “there are several student populations in which demand for a UK study visa has never been higher”. They were, in order; Nepal, Burma, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Kenya, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan and Qatar.

The problem with furthering the sector’s reliance on immigration is that the financial pressures are causing a skew in recruitment strategy from a qualitative approach of the “brightest and best” to a quantitative approach that focuses on sheer quantity of students. 

This is causing a widening attainment gap between international students, as I have already written: 

… non-EU students are now twice as likely to get lower-class degrees. Nottingham Trent, the university with the largest attainment gap, sees 20% of EU students and 26% of UK students receive a 2.2 or third class degree – compared to 54% of non-EU students. 

Those who arrive on the “Deliveroo Visa” also have significantly lower post-graduate earnings.

In 2019, the UK government’s International Education Strategy aimed to attract 600,000 international students to the country by 2030. But an arbitrary target of 600,000 students means you need 600,000 students; like William Westmoreland in Vietnam, actions are often decided by the metrics that are measured.

If we are to build a more successful and sustainable future for the UK universities, it cannot be based on recruiting ever more foreign students to avoid the government having to make politically difficult decisions.

These structural incentives must be addressed first. The 600,000 target for international students must be abolished, as must the graduate visa route. This will mean a reduction in student numbers, which will represent a significant shock to the sector. This can be mitigated through an unfreezing of student fees for UK students, with further increases linked to inflation. However, in order to prevent overburdening UK students, this should be linked to wider reforms to student loan repayments, such as abolishing the interest on such repayments.

If there are universities that are still on the brink of bankruptcy after these reforms, they must be allowed to go to the wall. At that point it will no longer be structural issues causing problems, but issues particular to that institution. Knocking another crisis off the list is relatively simple; we should build a system that entices the brightest and the best international students with a world-class education, not one that uses them to subsidise an unworkable business model.