Editorial Issue 7: Why the UK Government Should Not Cap International Student Places

Courtesy of the UK Government

Britain has a long history of immigration. In the lead-up to the Second World War, many persecuted minorities sought refuge here. After the war, a wave of immigration from the Commonwealth helped rebuild Britain’s economy and after joining the EU in 1973, the UK became the location of choice for many Europeans who came here to live and work. However, attitudes are beginning to change now, in a post-Brexit world. So, in an attempt to lower headline immigration figures and, thus, fulfil at least one of the many promises from the 2019 manifesto of the Conservative party, the Home Office is considering curbing the number of visas made available to international students on “low-quality” degrees.

This would be a glaring mistake. Universities — many of whom are battling with shrinking endowments — rely on international student tuition fees to cross-subsidise home students, who they typically make a loss on. Many universities, particularly those outside of the Russell Group, will risk going bankrupt.

And Britons will pay a large price. Research suggests that international students contribute £28.8 billion to the UK economy annually. If that money disappears, so too will the jobs and livelihoods it supports. The closure of universities in small towns and cities would have disastrous effects on local people and economies. Furthermore, it would undermine the government’s levelling up agenda. Living standards would plummet.

Placing a cap on the number of student immigrants would be an act of self-sabotage and would easily hijack the government’s current plan to rebuild the economy. Vivienne Stern, the chief executive of Universities UK, stated that “international students… are the source of 70% of our education export earnings. They sustain jobs in towns and cities up and down the country. They also bring enormous benefits to university campuses.” 

The UK is already one of the most popular destinations for international students in the world, second only to the US, but, after Brexit, many have been dissuaded from coming to Britain because of what looks like an increasingly inward-looking attitude towards the rest of the world. Limiting the number of international student universities places might exacerbate this image, and put us at risk of losing out to the US or Australia.

A cap on the number of international students is going to make it more difficult for Britain to maintain its place in the highly competitive sector of global higher education for a plethora of reasons, including financial ones. An analysis conducted by Universities UK shows that, in addition to the tuition fees, international students bring in over £3 billion per year in tax revenue.

Moreover, preventing international students from coming to study the elusive and yet-to-be-defined “low-quality degrees” might precipitate a scenario where international students don’t want to come to study high-quality degrees either, which has implications for the academic quality of our institutions and the research they put out. Being too choosy about which international students we want and which ones we don’t might mean that very few of them want to study in Britain at all.

The concept of “low-quality degrees” is not only used when talking about international students, either — there are calls to remove them from UK universities altogether. Yet, what exactly does the term mean? It seems there is no definitive answer, with No. 10 refusing to clarify what constitutes “low” or “high-quality”. The Office for Students has set a quality-enforcing threshold for full-time undergraduate degrees, which requires that at least 75% of students graduate from the course, and 60% subsequently enter employment or further study. Many degrees under this threshold are attended by those underrepresented in higher education, and cracking down on these courses may further discourage those from disadvantaged backgrounds to pursue a degree. It is also part of a persistent trend of cutting funding to arts degrees, which are often deemed a poor economic investment. This is a tangible repercussion of the Tory government’s disregard of the arts in general; their attitudes were confirmed with the now-infamous ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber’ advert (in which a ballerina is encouraged to retrain into tech). 

The aim of the government should be to review and improve “low-quality” degrees so that they are all in line with the UK quality code. The argument that those courses are actively harmful and that it would be in Britain’s interest to block tuition-paying international students from coming here to pursue them is untenable. Losing out on significant amounts of revenue would be detrimental to UK universities as the money from tuition fees is usually channelled towards funding for teaching costs as well as research. Cracking down on the number of international students and inadequate government funding could threaten the reputation of the UK as a stalwart for university research.

Losing out on international students would indubitably hinder the UK’s ambition of competing on the global stage. The government’s short-sighted focus on immediate economic reward reduces universities to mere employability factories when they are supposed to be focused on education and pioneering research. It is a dangerous way of thinking, and cutting down on ‘low-quality’ degrees or capping the number of international students would have long-term effects. Though the propositions would be undeniably harmful to the economy, the issue is also symbolic; threatening to permanently alter the UK’s reputation as a global centre for academia and prestigious higher education.