Solving higher education crisis will require a change in politics

The reason? International students and the UK Government’s increasingly twitchy approach to immigration rules as the rhetoric of curbing immigration meets the reality that UK higher education has become increasingly reliant on folk coming here from across the world to learn, grow, and foot the bill.

The numbers are striking. Back in 2014, the UK hosted around 450,000 international students. In the last decade, this has ­increased to just under 680,000 students. For folk working outside the sector, the shift is probably most visible in terms of the rise of more and bigger blocks of ­student ­accommodation to house them during their studies. Most come here to study from ­China, India, Nigeria, the United States and Pakistan.

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Given their formidable international ­reputations, Scottish institutions ­continue to attract more than their share. We learned last week that a record number of international students enrolled in Scottish institutions during 2022/2023. Just under 84,000 of Scotland’s 292,000 students came from outside the UK, with the balance ­being made up of 173,745 home students and 33,805 from England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

A few numbers give you a flavour of the impact of international fees on Scottish institutions. At Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt, research by The Ferret suggests a stonking 43% of all of the university’s income during the last couple of years came from international student fees. At Glasgow, this made up a full third of all the money it brought in.

The median proportion of income across the sector sits at a little more than a quarter, supplemented by tuition fees paid for by the ­Scottish Government, public funding, ­research grants – and for some of our older, wealthier institutions, dividends from ­historic endowments. Two institutions – Edinburgh and St Andrews – actually have more international students than Scottish students on their books.

Historically, UK governments used to smile on this practice. Universities are by their nature internationally minded institutions in dialogue with the world, ­speaking across borders, sharing ­knowledge, ­pursuing arguments, testing views. Don’t hoard knowledge, share it. ­Recruiting more international students also ­appealed to the Global Britain rhetoric of the 2000s, often articulated in the most ­nakedly self-interested terms. Planting your graduates across the globe is a form of soft power and cultural capital.

But now, the main drivers for the growth in international student numbers are ­financial. Voices across the sector have warned of the dangers of over-reliance on this income stream, and the unstable cross-subsidy it represents. Public sector funding for higher education in Scotland has reduced by 12% in real terms during the last seven years. Notwithstanding sky-high tuition fees, the situation for many English universities is difficult and stark. South of the border, some 40% of institutions are projected to fall into deficit this year.

On the cusp of the new academic year, university planners are braced for a ­significant contraction in ­international student numbers, which seems ­guaranteed to have a significant knock-on effect on many institutions’ financial planning and future viability.

The general secretary of the University and College Union Jo Grady has ­suggested that “anything short of an emergency ­rescue package for the sector will be ­insufficient to stave off catastrophe” for the English sector, describing redundancy schemes and the closure of departments as “shock absorbers” which structural challenges these institutions are facing. There is now talk of more mergers, more cuts, and more redundancies.

In Scotland, the situation at the ­University of Aberdeen has attracted the most attention. Management plans to cut modern language degrees attracted not only criticism from students and staff, but representations from the consulates of France, Germany, Italy and Spain about the adverse impact of ending the sometimes century-old classes and sacking the permanent staff who deliver them.

Understanding this, you can see why successive Home Office decisions have put this valuable educational ­market – and as a result, the institutions most ­reliant on this income – in profound ­jeopardy.

In January, the Home Office decreed that postgraduate students are now banned from bringing their dependants to the UK while they complete their ­studies unless they’re doing a longer-term ­research degree. The goal here was to “slash migration and curb abuse of the immigration system” – by leaving all those husbands, wives and kiddies at home. This was inevitably described as a “crackdown” by Conservative spinners

Then just a few months later, ­university leaders faced new immigration-based anxieties. Confronted with politically ­difficult immigration numbers just before a General Election, the Whitehall scuttlebutt ran around that Rishi Sunak was considering amending or even abolishing the post-study visa. This allows graduates from UK institutions to stay on for two or three years after securing their degrees.

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IF an international student wants to seek permission to stay in the UK after graduating, there’s currently an £822 ­application fee. And that’s just for starters. People who secure the graduate visa are required to cough up a healthcare surcharge – ­normally £1035 for every year they stay in the UK, above and beyond any ordinary taxes levied on the income they earn.

The suggestion was to hand them an immediate air ticket home with their parchments at graduation instead. Critics of the move – which at the time included several members of the last Tory cabinet, including Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron – argued that the crackdown on the crackdown could only damage the UK’s education sector and economic interests while achieving at best modest reductions in Britain’s immigration numbers.

The innovation was ditched, but something like it seems guaranteed to make a reappearance eventually under the new Labour government as it tries to honour its own commitment to reduce immigration.

There are powerful ironies here, if you look for them. A political party which talks about family values has taken us back to the future, where the ideal international student is an unaccompanied single man with enough cash to pay up, sits their assessments, and then leaves the country with his degree as quickly as possible.

Of itself, this may strike you as an ­instrumental, cynical and extractive ­vision for how our institutions of higher education should be operating, even ­before you consider the human cost and impact of positively requiring ­people ­studying here to leave their families ­behind them.

(Image: Radar)

One of my flatmates when I was ­doing a PhD was from the Philippines. For what must have been two- and-a-bit years, ­Analyn worked away from her family and kids to complete her studies. That’s a powerful sacrifice to require of anyone, as well as a powerful demand on any caregivers who are left behind.

But if all you really care about are the headline immigration numbers and a friendly write-up from the feral press, breaking up families like this is probably a matter of indifference to you.

It’s the pettiness of these tokenistic cruelties which stick with me. ­According to Home Office statistics, refusing to let Master’s students bring their partners or children to the UK lifts – at most – around 150,000 people out of Home ­Office ­statistics. 150,000 is one of those ­big-small numbers that all governments delight in. It has enough zeros in it to sound ­reasonably impressive in ­isolation but set against the context of a total ­population of 69 million souls and ­overall migration into the UK of 1.2 million in 2023 – it’s really chump change.

There are cogent questions to be asked about whether international students ­really belong in the immigration numbers at all. I spent a year in the Netherlands as part of the EU’s Erasmus scheme during the mid-2000s. I suppose I was an educational migrant – but the prospect of settling down for good in Utrecht seemed remote. My Dutch couldn’t nearly cut it.

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But the same goes for the overwhelming majority of international students coming to British students, often for one-year Master’s courses, learning something new, burnishing their credentials, seeing a bit of the world – with every intention of returning home.

The Labour manifesto – characteristically, you might think – avoided making any concrete commitments on funding or student immigration rules, but observed that the “current higher education funding settlement does not work for the taxpayer, universities, staff, or students” while pledging to “create a secure future for higher education and the opportunities it creates across the UK”.

There seems every chance this is the Starmer government’s next crisis. It ­remains to be seen whether Labour are capable of transforming the rhetoric of security into a reality.