Why are international PGRs so far off the policy radar?

Endless pieces have been written about international students over the last few years – but very few separate out international postgraduate research students specifically.

Yet the work of international postgraduate research students is at the heart of every major research challenge. They build links across the globe, they contribute to the intellectual capital of their institutions, they introduce new pedagogical innovations, and they have an array of skills that complement domestic talent.

Our research for Universities UK International, published today, suggests that international PGR students play a central but unappreciated role within the wider research ecosystem. While their outputs are difficult to measure, their impacts are made apparent through the institutions that are exceptionally proud of their contributions.

A policy void

In our scouring of the UK higher education sector we’ve found international PGR students who are projecting the UK’s soft power through building international exchanges and bringing new research contacts to the UK. Most significantly, we’ve tried to better understand how international PGR students are bringing with them deep technical expertise which complement the existing UK’s STEM base. And, importantly for Labour’s core missions, we’ve found numerous examples of how knowledge developed by this group of students is being applied to the UK’s economy, from traffic management to the economic geography of our cities.

Despite this quantifiable and valuable contribution there have been few systematic attempts to articulate the overall impact of international PGR students on the research ecosystem. We suspect this is because they fall unhappily between being “researchers in training” akin to members of academic staff while also being a group of students who have traditionally had fewer advocates in the wider student movement.

This knowledge gap isn’t just a shame for our collective knowledge of higher education, but a missing building block in building a research-intensive economy. There has been no clear sense from government on how international PGR students interact with wider government missions and ambitions for science and research, no discussion on what a comprehensive strategy to attract, exchange, and encourage these students would look like, and little joined-up thinking between how Britain wants to be seen internationally and how it treats these students domestically.

Ringing true

Crucially, there is also no evidence that international PGR students are displacing domestic talent – but they are in some cases making programmes viable for institutions to run. There has been, from time to time, a narrative that international students are taking the places of home students. As the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson put it:

If your child isn’t being discriminated against because you were stupid enough to have a successful career and go to a private school or buy a family home in a leafy postcode (NB: remember to purchase flat on sink estate next time), then the few remaining stellar university places they might have had a shot at will be snaffled by a Chinese or Indian student.

Needless invective aside, Pearson’s points, whatever their debatable merits, don’t ring true for PhD study. In a significant number of PhD programmes aligned to Britain’s economic future (including economics) international students form an absolute majority of students. In focus groups and meetings with universities it’s not that there is a glut of home students waiting to study highly specialised areas of AI – it is that Britain is too small a country to contain the sum total of talent required to fill every niche area of study.

And it is also the case that funding for international PhD students is limited by UKRI. There is a debate on whether the cap for funding should be higher or lower – which is more than a dispassionate economic analysis but a question of political judgement on how public funding is best deployed.

Strategy wrappings

If the benefits of attracting international PGR students are as massive for universities, higher education and the country as we believe, then the obvious question is how can the UK higher education system attract more of these students and enhance their experiences and impact while they are in the UK.

Part of the responsibility falls to government to address the yawning gaps in incidental costs compared to international competitors – think visas and health charges – which makes the UK a fundamentally more expensive place to study. Coupled with a deliberate strategy to attract these students, and more openly talk about their benefits, the UK has an opportunity to bring more international PGR students to the country.

Once the students are here, there is more work to be done to learn about their experiences and collect better data on their experiences. If this work can be wrapped in a deliberate strategy to integrate international PGR students into wider research ambitions then there is the opportunity to make the UK the premier destination for international PGR students.

The new government is looking around for ways to grow the economy, reset the UK’s position in the world, and better align universities with their missions for the economy. Starting with the attraction, retention, and impact of international PGR students could make an immediate difference to education and the country.