Boom and bust – but still whopping

The question for the sector tends to be whether the fall in international students has been too sharp – the question for the Home Office is more likely to be whether the fall has been far enough.

As ever, we get both full year-end figures for 2024, and the quiet-ish (but crucial January start) quarter 4 of 2024 – but the headlines couldn’t be clearer.

In 2024, there were 393,125 sponsored study visas granted to main applicants – 14 per cent fewer than in 2023, but some 46 per cent higher than 2019.

And in 2024 there were 21,978 visas issued to student dependants – 85 per cent fewer than the previous year.

That generates the smoothed graph that the Home Office always puts out – which very much implies that it’s the policy change on dependants that has driven the change.

And pretty much all of that increase-then-decrease has been in PGT:

If anything though, the graphs obscure the impact on overall immigration numbers. Last year saw 401,663 visas issued in total, down from 585,686 the previous year – made up by a drop of 62k main applicants (10 per cent) and 121k dependants.

And given that those totals are still far ahead of the original impact assessments and targets set in 2019, it’s hard to see how the Home Office might be persuaded to ease off some of the restrictions introduced at the fag-end of the last government.

January starts

Quarter 4 – the period that largely generates January starts – is worth a deep dive.

Notwithstanding bits of timing detail, main applicant issued figures suggest that numbers have now levelled-off:

Interestingly though, if we look just at decisions in the quarter, while withdrawals have fallen, it looks like refusals are still ahead of where they were back in Q4 2022:

Those withdrawal and refusal rates by country are always interesting to take a look at. Here’s the proportions for the top 10 countries:

We also get applications split by RG and non-RG – and as my colleague Michael Salmon noted here, there’s a difference in distribution…

Then there’s graduate route stats to look at – some of which might explain that Times story that’s been causing all the fuss this week.

The number of graduate route extensions granted to main applicants increased by 49 per cent to 170,371 in the latest year. Increases were also seen in the Health and Care Worker (+25 per cent) and Skilled Worker (+33 per cent) routes with 119,407 and 103,323 grants of extensions respectively in 2024 – although not all of those in those categories will have been students.

One other thing to note is that asylum claims in the UK reached a record high in 2024, with 108,000 people claiming asylum, relating to 84,000 cases – surpassing the previous record high of 103,000 claims in 2002. The suggestion swirling around the sector that the number of students in those figures is on the increase won’t be helping the sector’s case either.

This isn’t a quarter in which we get ONS stats on net migration – which leaves the press to pick up only on visa grants. Oxford’s Migration Observatory says that they fell by a “whopping” 460,000 from 2023-24 but remain at a “whopping” 950,000, with this quote attached:

The past few years have seen a “boom and bust” in some visa categories, particularly students’ family members and health and care visas. The large declines in visa grants have been possible primarily because the number of visas previously being issued in the post-Brexit immigration system was so high. Despite the declines, overall visa grants to non-EU citizens remain well above pre-Brexit levels.

International students staying in the UK for 12+ months are classified as long-term international migrants and included in net migration estimates. Data shows 87 per cent of students arriving in YE June 2023 remained after one year, and 22 per cent of those from YE June 2019 were still present in YE June 2024. Since January, ONS has been consulting on whether there is a need to produce an additional, alternative estimate of long-term net migration which excludes international students. The additional estimate may “complement” the official estimate of net migration – but people tend to grab at the numbers that fit their narrative, so it’s not clear it’ll help even if it does emerge.

And anyway – in another debate in a parallel universe, with a declining birth rate and a growing ratio of pensioners to working-age people, the desire to suggest (either to applicants or the public) that they don’t stay wouldn’t be a thing when the stats might suggest that we very much need them to do.