As the new government seeks to “kick start growth” and “break down barriers to opportunity” as part of its five missions, there is a unique window of opportunity for the higher education sector.
Falling enrolment, driven by the dependents’ policy and coupled with student sentiment, are weighing heavily on the sector and September overseas student recruitment is looking challenging.
While this creates a period of significant challenge, it also presents a foundation on which to rebuild.
Falling numbers mean that overseas students will likely no longer be such a toxic part of the political discourse. And as a result, the space is created to make an evidence-based, practical argument for the role of international students in fostering the growth agenda.
The current state of play
The proposed review announced by James Cleverley in May could still see the UKVI increase the fractional costs of overseas recruitment through increased agent oversight, “enhanced” English language requirements, and further compliance expectations from universities to reduce dropout rates. However, if we can steady overseas recruitment then we are most of the way to stabilising the sector – financially, operationally and academically.
Key to this will be the emergence of a new industrial strategy – one that foregrounds HE’s well-recognised (but sometimes marginalised) role in economic development, facilitated by international recruitment. With the talent needs so identified, we can reconnect the link between recruitment of overseas students and staff to the delivery of these crucial outcomes, thereby addressing the poisonous political consensus that there should be two separate and distinct visa routes – to work or to study.
From the response to the introduction of the Graduate Route, we know that individuals come here primarily to study, but also with a desire to contribute to our workforce needs, to secure skills and expertise, and then to return home.
We are unlikely to follow Australia down the migration rabbit hole of institutional caps (which were more about unequal distribution amongst different types of institution and the concentration of students in two cities, rather than absolute numbers). However, those that think the problems in Australia and Canada will provide an extended window of opportunity for the UK market are mistaken: it may be as little as 6 months before Australia is back in the game, and the recent Studyportals research showed that a Trump Presidency (which recent events have made a near certainty) will do next to nothing to affect the growing numbers who want to study in the USA.
Crowding in
We have already heard the government talk about using public money to draw in private sector investment, to deliver its change agenda. For us, that means being prepared to build “coalitions of the willing”: comprising public universities and private sector partners who are committed to working together to pilot and pump-prime new ways of working.
I saw, at first hand, the power of pump-priming funding and piloting amongst committed groups of universities when at the former Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The Australian Accord has also concluded that there should be a tertiary body which can assist the sector in navigating the challenges ahead, modelled on the much-maligned HEFCE, and also that there should be a source of risk capital (although, in a misstep, it suggests creating this through force, by taxing universities).
We do not need to reinvent HEFCE to deliver the power of universities working collaboratively and systematically. We already see this in the continued success of networks like World Universities Network and the growing impact of regional networks like London Higher. It is time to embrace this opportunity for change. Committed institutions must come together around shared approaches to international recruitment, TNE development, internationalisation at home including, of course, student and staff mobility and developing the capability of our staff for global engagement.
This is not naïve and utopian. In fact, it has already happened, incidentally, through the roundtables that IHEC has run.
The challenge now is to make this a purposeful, saleable and significant activity, one that will impact the performance of the sector. We must, systematically, bring together institutions with a range of private sector providers who have demonstrated their commitment to working together. With the sector, we can then implement a coherent set of interventions that encompass the entirety of the student journey – from marketing, to generate more and better qualified applications, through to retention and progression and, finally, to graduation and alumni management.
We are “special”, but not so special that the government funds us properly, and similarly we are not so special that we will escape significant re-shaping. This is continuity New Labour – it will be a “something for something” government – working together across the sector really does provide us with an opportunity to give ourselves and the government a basis to lever in more money and expertise to deliver growth and productivity for the sector and the economy more broadly.
