Who pays the price when universities cancel offers to protect refusal rates?

Earlier this year I argued that using large non-refundable deposits to manage immigration compliance risk was immoral and probably unlawful.

That practice loads the cost of the Home Office’s increasingly hostile approach to international education onto individual applicants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.

But as refusal rates climb – seemingly to record levels in recent weeks – universities are looking for ways to stay below the threshold.

According to the FT, universities have been revoking offers en masse, such that applicants never get far enough for UKVI to refuse them.

In the first half of 2026, 10.5 per cent of study visa applications to the UK were withdrawn, up from 2.3 per cent in the same period last year and 0.4 per cent in 2023.

For Pakistan the figure was 40.9 per cent, up from 3 per cent, for Bangladesh 23.5 per cent, and for Nigeria 22.7 per cent.

A student can only apply for a visa once they hold an offer, so when the offer goes the application goes too – and universities told the paper that revoked offers are the main driver.

Around 15 universities are thought to have stopped recruiting from Pakistan altogether.

Rate expectations

For Basic Compliance Assessments (BCAs) applied for on or after 1 June, a sponsor’s visa refusal rate has to stay below 5 per cent, down from 10 per cent.

Home Office refusals of study visas doubled in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025. Enroly’s data suggests almost half of universities are already above the new threshold.

Universities UK International’s Jamie Arrowsmith told the FT that many refusals:

…appear to rest on flawed, inconsistent and highly subjective reasoning, forcing universities to withdraw offers at scale to avoid breaching compliance thresholds.

If a university withdraws a student’s CAS before UKVI decides the visa application, that CAS is excluded from the BCA refusal-rate calculation.

A Reddit commenter who says they work in immigration compliance at a UK university told a worried applicant that many universities now give a CAS a fixed lifespan “because they want that visa outcome fast in order to factor it into their visa refusal rate”, and that a CAS can be cancelled even after the visa application has gone in.

Cancel culture

One applicant’s husband describes his wife holding an unconditional offer and a CAS for an MRes, taking out a bank loan, applying for her visa and giving biometrics. A week later the university withdrew the CAS “as they think my wife’s visa application can get rejected”, and asked them to withdraw the visa application too. It gave no reason and hasn’t answered their emails since.

Another applicant, already in the UK after one master’s, lost their place four days before the course started, having paid an £8,000 deposit, accepted a £3,000 scholarship and signed a year-long tenancy at £265 a week.

The email apparently said the decision was “based on its current admissions and student sponsorship assessment and is not based on a specific UKVI provision” – an account of whose interests were being assessed.

Over on Instagram, under the posts one university uses to recruit in Nigeria, applicants are comparing notes on an email they say “immediately instructed students to cancel their visa applications”, with UKVI delays and Nigerian refusal levels given as the reasons.

After a meeting, the university decided anyone who could prove they’d done biometrics could stay in – great for them, but not much use to those who’d already cancelled as instructed, and who were now asking in the comments what was supposed to happen to them.

Another applicant complains of visa deadlines set for particular courses “as if it is the students’ fault those courses were discontinued”, while another says “the school called to tell me 12th October as deadline”.

Agents have worked out the game too. This is the advice one Nigerian agent is now giving applicants, capitals and all.

If you receive an interview invitation, do NOT attend.

Presumably the logic is that once UKVI wants to interview you, your university is going to pull you anyway.

Institutions are pre-emptively refusing CAS to any application that looks remotely risky

…ran one email to agents in July. Maryem Abbas, who runs a consultancy in Lahore, was telling Dawn as far back as December that students were being “withdrawn at the final stage”.

And in May a Pakistan-based recruitment manager writing in PIE News described “silent” CAS withdrawals – you find out by logging into the portal after UKVI has rung to book your interview.

Doing as the university asks doesn’t protect the student either. One Bangladeshi applicant withdrew their visa application at the university’s request, “due to high chance of visa refusal”, only for UKVI to reply that “further checks are required on your application and we are unable to accept your request”.

Another withdrew and emailed UKVI, and two days later received a formal refusal anyway, on the ground that “my CAS has been withdrawn by my university”. Every visa form they fill in from now on will ask whether they’ve ever been refused. They’ll have to tick yes.

Postcode lottery

Something notable about the notices that agents are passing round is that they don’t agree on who counts as being “from” somewhere.

Some are about nationality, with a get-out for nationals already in the UK. Others are about residence – applicants “residing in” or “domiciled in” a country, and in one case most of sub-Saharan Africa. And some slice countries up.

Agents have been compiling lists – here’s one, and here’s one just for Bangladesh – with universities shutting the door on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Kashmir, Sylhet, Dhaka, or Punjab and Haryana in India. At least one has taken existing applicants from a blacklisted province out of the process altogether. One compiler notes that a lot of it is “shared privately with agents”.

Nor is it exactly surgical. One Bangladeshi applicant posted the rejection they’d been sent – “we are not accepting any applications from Sylhet region” – and pointed out that they’re from Jessore.

Another, already through the visa process for a London campus, says their agent told them the university’s country manager had a “5% issue”, and that “as a Sylheti applicant, you will definitely face a refusal”.

A Nigerian consultant reports a client refused admission to a course “because of the high Visa Refusal Rate in Nigeria (39%)” – a judgement about a passport made without reference to the applicant.

Contract killers

Until an offer is accepted, a university can pull it much as any trader can. After that, the CMA thinks there’s a binding contract – the university has agreed to hold a place and let the student enrol if they meet the conditions.

You can’t apply for a visa without a CAS, and you don’t usually get a CAS until you’ve accepted and paid a deposit. Plenty of the people behind that 10.5 per cent will have had one.

The same CMA statement warns that a term giving a provider wide discretion to cancel:

…effectively means the HE provider could simply choose not to comply with the terms of the offers it has made.

Its unfair terms guidance, CMA37, says a no-fault cancellation right is more likely to be fair if it is non-discretionary.

In the CMA’s view, cancellation should be limited to circumstances where performance has become impossible or impractical; the trigger should be spelled out and should not be something within the trader’s control.

It’s not at all clear that “We’re worried about our BCA” would pass any of those tests.

I’ve been looking at the terms at various of the universities that seem to be mass-withdrawing. One claims an “absolute discretion” to withdraw an offer, but it’s in the section on criminal convictions. Another suggests it can withdraw for fraud, or in “exceptional circumstances” it then doesn’t define.

Another claims it can end the contract if you don’t meet visa requirements, which doesn’t sound to me like the same thing as the university guessing you might not. And under section 69 of the Consumer Rights Act, if a term is capable of different meanings, the meaning most favourable to the consumer prevails.

The genuine student argument may not get far either. Sponsors have to assess each applicant, and pulling a CAS from someone who fails that assessment is probably fine. The woman whose MRes CAS went a week after biometrics wasn’t assessed and found wanting – her university just thought her visa “can get rejected”.

If it’s a breach, the bill doesn’t stop at the deposit. There’s the visa fee, the agent’s fee, the £265-a-week tenancy, flights, and interest on the loan. Some of these families sold land to fund the attempt.

Passport control

Section 91 of the Equality Act says a university must not discriminate “by not admitting the person as a student”. Race, in the Act, includes nationality. Drop someone because they’re Pakistani and that’s direct discrimination, and it’s not clear that there’s a justification defence for direct discrimination – sponsor licence or no sponsor licence.

Nasar Meer talked about all of this on the LSE’s politics blog in January, back when this was mostly about pausing new applications. Treating people less favourably by nationality, he wrote, “cannot be justified by appeals to cost, efficiency or ‘tough choices’ about compliance”. His line that applicants’ grades, savings and English-language certificates suddenly count for less because of the nationality on their passport now applies to people who’d already been given a place.

Universities may seek to rely on Schedule 23, which permits nationality discrimination when acting “in pursuance of” an enactment or ministerial arrangements. The Lords looked at the same phrase in the Race Relations Act in Hampson, and went with “narrow construction” – acts done “in necessary performance of an express obligation contained in the instrument”, as the High Court put it in Goloshvili. A discretion doesn’t appear to count.

That’s partly because nothing in the BCA makes anyone stop recruiting in Pakistan. When ministers want nationality rules, they write them. The June announcement came with a visa brake on Afghan, Cameroonian, Burmese and Sudanese nationals, and Migration Minister Mike Tapp saying “The UK will always welcome genuine international students”. Pakistanis, Nigerians and Bangladeshis weren’t on the list.

Residence rules are indirect discrimination, so they can be justified if they’re proportionate. Proportionate to what, though? Universities already run individual interviews and money checks. Cut the whole country anyway and the people who passed those get cut too.

The district bans look very problematic. A ban on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa falls mostly on Pashtuns. A ban on Sylhet falls on the region most British Bangladeshi families come from. That’s ethnic or national origins territory, before anyone even asks to see the equality impact assessment that the public sector equality duty implies.

Meer’s warning was about data that “systematically pick out the same racialised and religiously marked populations”. Going down to district level doesn’t appear to change who gets picked out.

Nobody’s watching

Last year I wrote about the applicant who emails the CMA, gets sent to OfS, is told OfS “will not be able to update you on the progress or outcome of the issue that you have raised”, and then finds the OIA won’t touch them because they never enrolled. None of that has moved. In theory, you could sue from Lahore, but I haven’t found an example of anyone doing so.

Instead it sometimes gets settled other ways. In September Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency arrested a consultant over a £4,000 deposit that a UK university had kept. In June, Nigerian agents told PIE News that families were extorting them over money universities wouldn’t give back.

Meer’s list of who had said nothing in January – the EHRC, OfS, Parliament – still looks right to me. The CMA has had its own fining powers under the DMCC Act since April 2025, and set out its view on cancelled offers in 2021.

OfS’s existing prohibited behaviours list covers providers keeping money for services they cancel, but it currently applies under initial condition C5 to newer providers. OfS has proposed extending the approach through ongoing condition C6, which has been delayed yet again.

It is of course the case that universities are in a real bind. A sponsor whose refusal rate tips over 5 per cent can lose the right to recruit internationally at all, the data it gets back from UKVI arrives too late to act on, and refusals themselves have surged without anyone in the Home Office explaining why.

When the sector’s own representative body is collecting examples of applicants refused because a caseworker couldn’t place their university in the right county, what is going on inside UKVI is a fair question – and so is why a threshold was halved at the very moment the decisions it depends on became less predictable.

But a risk landing on an institution still leaves a choice about who absorbs it. A university can recruit less, interview more, take deposits later and make a louder noise in Whitehall, and some have. Some have pulled people who’d accepted, paid, passed the interview and given biometrics, and whose remaining problem was where they were from.

I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know whether the decisions the FT summarises have been made consciously in contravention of the law, or whether they represent what what amounts to the least worst (or least legally/financially risky) option on a given day.

What I’m more sure about when UKVI tightens the screws and raises the risks is that the costs somehow never land on ministers, caseworkers or universities. They land on families in Lahore, Sylhet and Lagos who have borrowed, sold up, and done everything they are asked, only to discover that having done so is the very thing that costs them.