The financial health of the UK’s university system has come to rely on growth in international student recruitment. For a long time, that growth seemed inevitable.
There were numerous large, established markets that offered high-volume growth – China chief among them. Then there were the newer markets promising big opportunities: Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and others.
This is no longer the case. The graduate route boom is well and truly over, and recruitment has fallen significantly since 2023.
Those with an eye on the Home Office’s monthly visa statistics will have noticed that the number of sponsored study visa applications in August is down again this year, 16 per cent lower than the year ending August 2025 and around 27 per cent lower than the peak of 2022–23.
Despite these years of decline, providers’ own forecasts submitted to the Office for Students still point to an expected overall increase of 22.5 per cent in international students by 2028. Only recently have some institutions begun to alter their forecasts, predicting a flatlining or modest reduction in student numbers. At conferences over the summer, attendees could still be heard eagerly debating where the next student gold-rush might come from – whether, for example, “Algeria is the next Nepal.”
But the data tells a different story. Today, Public First are releasing new economic modelling that explores not just the potential for growth in the UK’s international student numbers, but also whether that growth would be stable.
The overlap problem
In our model, each country is given a score for stability: how dependable it is as an ongoing source of international students.
This is based on measures of factors impacting a country’s demand for UK higher education, including global mobility, domestic wealth, and the attractiveness of the UK’s competitors, among others. We also score countries for opportunity, reflecting how much additional growth is realistically available in each country. This reflects a combined measure of remaining headroom under today’s UK visa regime with the scale of the country’s growth potential.
The problem: we find almost no overlap between the countries where growth is possible and those stable enough to depend on for recruitment in the long term.
Traditional markets like China and India have little to no headroom for growth. China is likely to send no more than 140,000 students per year in the long term, slightly lower than in recent years, largely due to demographic decline. In India – a country more exposed to UK visa refusals, with weaker currency and higher income fluctuation – the UK currently recruits numbers far above what is sustainable in the long term. We predict only about half of the UK’s Indian student numbers from 2024–25 can be counted on for the future.
Many universities will look to countries with rising incomes, those whose students historically tended towards regional study destinations but now look further afield. This includes the likes of Nepal, where HESA enrolment data shows growth of 1,000 per cent from a low baseline since 2021–22, as well as Zimbabwe, Vietnam and Brazil.
But these markets carry risk.
In our model, most of those offering what appears to be significant growth ultimately score in the bottom 50 per cent for stability. Nigeria should be seen as a warning here. Providers that had built their numbers on Nigeria are still dealing with the consequences of the sharp drop that followed changes to dependant visa rules and a crash in the Nigerian currency.
Three ways this plays out
Of the countries we modelled, just nine sit in the “viable zone,” scoring high for both stability and opportunity.
The numbers involved here are steady but small, and nowhere near enough to make up for shortfalls from China and India – even before factoring in the growing appeal of regional education hubs across South and East Asia.
Under the current university funding model, there are three ways this could end:
- Providers pursue less stable markets, requiring high levels of effort and agility, with unpredictable returns and the risk of high visa refusal rates.
- The government introduces policy change aimed at stability, creating visa policy which is attractive enough to open up the possibility of claiming more students from stable markets off our Anglophone competitors.
- The government and universities accept and plan together for a shrinking university sector and the consequences of that.
The Office for Students’ latest assessment of financial sustainability suggests 58 per cent of English providers will be in deficit by 2028–29 in a “no growth” scenario. Without policy change aimed at stability, contraction will come anyway, but much more chaotically.
The question for government should be whether it wants the sector to continue to play recruitment whack-a-mole as providers seek to make ends meet by enrolling students from an ever changing patchwork of less reliable countries, or whether it is willing to work with the sector to find a serious, long-term solution.
