The MRes boom isn’t just an issue of visa policy

Over the weekend, the Financial Times picked up on an issue that has been known to the higher education sector for at least a year – the rapid growth in international research master’s enrolments at a relatively small number of UK universities, in the context of students on these courses still being eligible to bring family members and other dependants.

The article named four universities that have seen a “surge” in numbers on MRes courses – in three cases, from a starting point of zero enrolments in 2022–23 – since the ban on postgraduate taught students bringing dependants. A similar pattern can be seen if we look at year-on-year growth in international student numbers across all of postgraduate research:

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In an interview with the paper, international education champion Steve Smith flags the possibility that the government could impose further restrictions on dependant visas, which is not the first time this has been hinted at. We’re told that officials in the Department for Education and the Department for Business and Trade are waiting to see if the growth continued in the current academic year – FOI data reported elsewhere has already shown that at least one of the institutions scaled up international MRes recruitment substantially further.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Financial Times article is this line at the end:

Malcolm Press, president of Universities UK, said the lobby group had been ‘firm’ with members about growth in MRes numbers and that the ‘vast majority’ had heeded the warning.

‘In the very small number of cases where there has been growth, we would urge government to use the powers it already has to intervene in a targeted and proportionate way, rather than making further changes to the immigration rules that will increase uncertainty and punish providers,’ he added.

If a majority of universities had immediately started setting up new research master’s provision after the dependants ban (in particular following the pattern we are largely seeing of 12-month courses, in particular though not exclusively in business-related areas), the Home Office would inevitably have sprung into action.

If none had, and the research master’s had continued to be a relatively niche offer based on longstanding programmes (often with a two-year duration or a clear pipeline into a specific doctoral programme, or at least firmly embedded in a wider institutional research specialism), then we would have likely never spoken of it again, despite the fact that having conversations about the breadth and depth of postgraduate provision that the sector has to offer is probably a good idea every once in a while.

But we’re in an edge case where a few institutions look to have pursued the idea pretty vigorously, and sector-led efforts to coordinate have not changed behaviour in all cases. And so we have a situation where Universities UK is recognising that the government is likely minded to intervene, and hoping to ensure that this is done using existing powers – for example, you would imagine, via UKVI’s ability to manage the application process for new Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies certificates – rather than through a move that affects the whole sector.

But it’s tricky to expect the Home Office to make sensible decisions about what at the end of the day is a question of education provision. It could certainly start thinking more deeply about subject mix and course level when allocating visas – but this shouldn’t really be its job and not many in the sector would want it to be. The “boom” in MRes in the grand scheme of things does not actually involve enormous student numbers, but it raises deeper questions nonetheless: in particular, what the right “mix” of the UK’s international postgraduate offer might look like, and who has oversight of it.

How we got here

At the time of introducing the dependants ban, the Home Office didn’t say much about its rationale for exempting students on research master’s programmes – they seem to have been seen as a longer duration course only available at certain research-intensive institutions, wholly distinct from the booming taught master’s market.

In conducting its impact assessment, the department said that it had “not historically recorded the level of postgraduate course at the granularity of ‘taught’ or ‘research’ because it has until now had no impact on the immigration rules a student would be subject to.” As if to demonstrate that it didn’t have a particular handle on the numbers involved, the appendix reveals that in calculating how many students and dependants would be unaffected by the ban, it used an “experimental methodology” to categorise courses based on their title:

For example, records with capitalised course names containing “MRES” are assigned to Postgraduate Research.

And certainly there was no anticipation that demand would be displaced to research master’s programmes (my bolding):

No behavioural response is assumed from main applicants in response to the policy change in terms of the course they choose (e.g. assuming students instead apply for postgraduate research courses where dependants are allowed instead of postgraduate taught courses). This may, however, not be possible in reality anyway as they are different qualifications with different entry requirements and consequently are not close substitutes.

This might have been the case at the time – though as we’ve seen it wasn’t something the Home Office had access to any detailed analysis on – but the possible behavioural response from institutions wasn’t factored in. The idea that providers could open up new MRes provision, or that recruitment agents would begin to use dependants rules as the foremost selling point of such programmes (there continue to be many examples of this on social media), doesn’t seem to have been anticipated.

Masters of the universe

As we’ve been over on the site at great length recently, the framing of the international education strategy around revenue generation abroad and sustainable (overall) numbers at home is politically helpful for the sector. But neither of these framing devices are necessarily issues of education strategy – which is to say, what education does the government, and the sector, actually want international students to receive and/or be entitled to?

The immigration rules describe research-based degrees as comprising “a research component (including a requirement to produce original work) that is larger than any accompanying taught component when measured by student effort.” When applied to level 7 study, one can detect a curious tension here between competing visions for what master’s degrees are for. Especially where they are positioned as bridges to further academic study at doctoral level, a greater emphasis on research and original work is surely to be encouraged. But where the MRes is seen through a visa lens, it would be exactly the kind of opportunity that UKVI, with its growing emphasis on vigilance about where international students are and what they are doing in the room, would see as less welcome.

The industrial strategy is heavily concerned with the UK workforce’s readiness to engage at the cutting-edge of science and technology. Skills England wants provision up to level 8 to be considered as part of local skills needs. UKRI is thinking hard about doctoral stipends and disciplines.

But when it comes to master’s level courses, the only actor who anyone can currently imagine taking a view is the Home Office – and it’s to the detriment of the system’s health that no-one is really setting out a vision for what progress would look like. The debates over MRes growth encapsulate this wider problem: isn’t provision that seeks to prepare future researchers exactly what we should want to see more of in the system, along with practice-based and employer-engaged professional courses? But this rosy picture gets comprehensively undermined if the research-based master’s just ends up being PGT in a new outfit, and perhaps a little less expensive to teach.

The MRes question has its roots in a much wider and much more serious contemporary reality – that the sector’s financial viability is wedded to high volume postgraduate provision in a relatively small number of cheaper-to-deliver subject areas – which is surely not where we wanted to be. And especially not, if individual institutional behaviour is then able to destabilise other areas of longstanding value, and no-one is quite sure whose responsibility it is to put the brakes on.