When nativism and deglobalisation meet the sagging bottom line

Ten years ago we could confidently say that we lived in an age of globalisation. Almost every increase in international student numbers and cross-border research collaboration was seen as positive, in government and the public sphere. Those days are gone.

Deglobalisation and singular bounded national identity, or nativism, which entered mainstream politics with Brexit in 2016, have now sunk roots across the whole Euro-American West, while US/China geopolitics have transformed scientific collaboration into a national security problem. The implications for higher education have not yet fully sunk in – but they are immense. Global relations in higher education closely influence the local/national setting, and vice versa.

Deglobalisation is very much a Western phenomenon. In non-Western countries there is no evidence of growing opposition to international connections. But the rise of non-Western powers across the world, not only China but also India, Iran, South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia and more, pushing through the old colonial hierarchy and white supremacy, have fostered deep anxieties in Euro-America about global openness. In the United States both sides of politics believe that China profited more from open globalisation than did the US, where the trade deficit has ballooned. US leaders see it as in the interests of the US to decouple from China, erecting trade barriers and securitising scientific links. Other Western countries are following.

The hot button issue

Here the cold calculations that guide decoupling and tariffs are reinforced by migration. It is migration above all that concentrates and amplifies Western nativism.

Resistance to migration is now front and centre in politics. Shaped by economic immiseration and inequality, carrying more than a whiff of racism, everywhere nativism is driving the rise of the far right. Once it has momentum, political nativism does not stop at migration. The far right would decouple all international links, in higher education as elsewhere. Trump and Vance will bear down hard on American universities and science. But migration is the hot button issue, the song that Trump, Farage, Badenoch and the tabloids always sing.

Governments believe that to survive politically they must adapt to the mood rather than try to change it. The July election in the UK and the November election in the US were contests for the votes of working class communities that have been hollowed out by austerity, automation and global trade. After decades with little prospect of improvement many people in these communities fear being displaced by immigrants, especially non-white applicants for refugee status, that they see as ranking below themselves.

Yet Western economies need populations of low-paid migrant workers – and governments find it very hard to cut those numbers. The soft target for demonstrable reductions is international students.

Translated into government policy on student visas, anti-migration politics are now playing absolute havoc with international student numbers across the Anglophere. Canada is implementing a reduction in international students of 40 per cent over two years and Australia may cut numbers by 30 per cent. In the UK first degree and master’s level international students can no longer bring dependants, and application costs and health charges have surged. Student visa applications from January to October 2024 were 16 per cent below the same period last year. Many universities are well short of their targets.

Governmental policy interventions that destabilise or limit international engagement in higher education, like visa reductions or the securitisation of cross-border research linkages, are very difficult for research universities. Their global mission is crucial to both their long-term identity and their national contribution. This poses the question of how to ground a more balanced and defensible global mission amid local communities that are hurting.

Terrible timing

More immediately to the point, it’s terrible financial timing. While institutions’ international revenues are falling the 2012 funding system has gone belly-up – domestic student fees have lost 30 per cent in value since 2017. The £285 fee rise in the budget hardly touched this. The last 12 years have shown us that it is politically impossible for student fee levels to be maintained in line with inflation. Students simply have too many votes for this to happen. The 2012 system is unworkable without running down the quality of provision over time.

The compound result of this double dive, in domestic fee value and international students, is an out and out disaster for university finances. Some are hurting worse than others.

Deglobalisation and the drop in international students also brings to a head something that has been a long time coming in UK. That is the destabilisation of mission in institutions that see themselves as global research universities, and especially the balance between their local and national work on the one hand, and their global work on the other.

Economics out of whack with politics

The Brexit vote showed for all to see a map of Remain-voting universities scattered among Leave-supporting populations across the country. This made it mandatory that UK institutions bed down in their localities and regions. While some already did this, all were caught up in global promotion.

The funding incentive to go global has kept on increasing since. Institutions can hardly transform their local engagement while putting more and more energy into international education and the global research which sustains rankings and recruitment. Between 2016–17 and 2022–23 full fee paying non-EU international students in England jumped from 14 to 24 per cent. In 2016–17 income from non-EU internationals was 39 per cent of domestic fee income, but by 2022–23 that ratio had risen to 74 per cent.

Institutions are trying to be more global than ever in a country in the middle of a nativist revolt. The economics are totally out of whack with the politics. Worse, enhancing the global mission is now blocked by government policy on visas: institutions are left struggling – in vain – to achieve an extreme mission skew to the global, one that works against them because it undermines their local/national mission and their social base. Isn’t that completely nuts?

It is hard to think of a more effective way to deconstruct higher education on all fronts. A sector which thought it was in clover 12 years ago because David Willetts’ Thatcher-on-steroids full fee market had gifted it with £9,000 per student, and because it had been told that the knowledge economy was the beating heart of national life, now finds itself staring into the abyss.

Building blocks

This cannot go on. And we have to do much better than “give us £3,000 more per domestic student and no cap on international student numbers.” What then are the building blocks of a reconstructed policy to ground both the local/national mission and the global mission?

First, the global mission and local/national mission affect each other, they are distinct, and also closely joined. The balance between them must be monitored and managed.

Second, the way to go right now is not to further pump up international student fees – increasing both economic dependence and political isolation – but to reconstruct both national funding and the mission compact between institutions and their society. And we need an international programme with 12 to 15 per cent of the total student body – not 25 to 30 per cent – as well as more students from the European region, and a mix of fees, scholarships and subsidies, not a tiny handful of scholarships and neocolonial fee levels averaging £22,000 per student, as at present. In this way we can sustain a defensible global agenda, with a more post-colonial stance, and keep alive that global mission amid the deadly serious cultural and political pressures to snuff it out.

Finally, small domestic fee increases will not cut it, and slugging British students in the “student-centred system” even more is outrageously unfair to them – in a higher education that is fully funded by student fees, they have to pay for the public goods generated by institutions and absorbed by society, as well as the private goods they receive themselves. The only viable funding basis of the mission compact between institutions and society is a return to a mix of student fees and direct public payments to institutions – as Augar stated in 2019, and as is used in every public higher education system in the world, including the US and the other countries in the Anglosphere.

This article is an edited version of the Draper’s Lecture 2024, which was held at Queen Mary University of London on Thursday 14 November.