Amongst the literature talks, folk music, STEMM activities, the open-air stage for music and bands and the renowned competitions programme, Wednesday saw a talk called “Wasting billions in student emigration”.

Huw Griffiths – who’s a lecturer in education studies at UWTSD – said that the £550m “spent” by the Welsh Government last year on support for students from Wales studying elsewhere was “absolutely bonkers”.

Dyfodol i’r Iaith (“A Future for the Language”) is a campaign group that works to ensure that Welsh language occupies a central role in Welsh life – and it sounds like Griffiths was using figures the organisation published originally back in May.

It used FOI requests to determine how much money was being spent on grants or loans on students from Wales studying outside of it – and found that more than half a billion in “taxpayer pounds” was spent on their living costs and tuition fees”

This budget has increased by 60 per cent over 5 years and includes £221,593,000 on undergraduate tuition fee support costs – money it could have given to the Universities of Wales if it scrapped the current policy.

Let’s ignore for a second that the bulk of that half a billion is loaned out and comes back in eventually.

The concern is that the current system facilitates an “increasingly excessive exodus” of young academic people from Wales – a brain drain that “weakens the business bases of Welsh Universities”, undermines the aims and objectives of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol (which creates Welsh medium study opportunities in tertiary education) and weakens efforts to create a more strong and economically progressive Wales:

It’s about time policy is adopted which puts Wales first. It should also support students’ ability to consider higher education beyond the country but with less financial support than if they studied in Wales. This is what Scotland and Northern Ireland have done.

It’s true, of course, that students in Northern Ireland from Northern Ireland are only charged £4,750 – but the emigration issue there is largely about capacity. And in Scotland the “free education” on the tuition fees side clearly does keep more students from Scotland in Scotland – but I doubt Welsh universities would be thrilled about the unit of resource falling to that in NI or Scotland.

So if we run with the idea that the scale of Welsh emigration has reached such a critical point that policy needs to be adopted that provides “financial incentives to encourage our young people to study in Wales” and “contribute constructively and enthusiastically to their future”, it’s not at all clear what that policy would look like.

Reducing fees might be a runner for students in principle – but that would hit university finances. R-UK universities can’t jack their fees up to create a differential. And so what Dyfodol i’r Iaith is left with is either fiddling with loan terms, or differential levels of student maintenance support.

Wales binned off its (partial) tuition fee grants back in 2018 – these days it runs a partial cancellation scheme on maintenance loan balances that sees up to £1,500 taken off their loan balance when they make their first loan repayment.

Maybe that could be restricted to those who study in Wales – or maybe to those who return, given that the Welsh Government says that almost half of the students who leave to study in another country return to work in Wales. The problem is that some notional write off of debt later is unlikely to influence students’ choices on where to study.

Maybe Wales could somehow number-control its loans for fees and maintenance, capping the volume of loans it’ll hand out for those studying elsewhere. But I doubt there’s a politician that will want to announce what will instantly be seen as a “cap on aspiration” – and anyway, Wales HE participation rate is already a major concern.

Maybe Wales could loan more out in maintenance for those who study in Wales – but it already has the most generous package (no means testing and it’s linked to the living wage) – and while it could loan less out to students who study elsewhere, that does rather destroy the principle that its maintenance arrangements are based on need.

And anyway, a lot of the subsidies involved in the Welsh loan scheme are managed by and budgeted in Westminster rather than Cardiff Bay – I’ve talked before here about the weird irony involved in Scotland, where effectively students and universities miss out on Treasury subsidy given the free fees policy.

That leaves you with trying to influence the choices that students make via information, advice and guidance – and in the firing line for Dyfodol i’r Iaith is the Seren Network – which has now been renamed Academi Seren.

It was set up in 2015 following a report by Lord Paul Murphy into Oxbridge not receiving enough Welsh students, and now aims to helping Wales’ “most able learners” achieve their “full academic potential” and support their education pathway into “leading universities in the UK, and overseas”.

Plaid Cymru’s education spokesperson – Cefin Campbell MP – argues that the Seren scheme needs to be “turned on its head” to ensure that the brightest pupils stay:

More needs to be done to stop the haemorrhage of students out of Wales.

Author and language campaigner Heini Gruffudd argues that Seren is encouraging a “vicious cycle” of making English universities stronger while Wales’ institutions weaken:

Seren should give priority to Welsh universities to ensure that the best students are confident enough that they could get the best education in Wales.

But neither of them seem to be able to explain what a different approach would look like, other than acting as some sort of IAG mafia – talking down opportunities outside of Wales to promote the sunlit uplands of Bangor, Cardiff, Swansea or whatever.

And anyway – the Welsh Government denies that the Seren scheme encourages students to leave the country, arguing that 35.2 per cent of Seren learners who started university in 2023 had studied in Wales. Lord Murphy certainly isn’t happy with the idea:

We cannot deny opportunities for Welsh people to go to the best universities in the world… an introspective attitude is at the heart of the belief that we [as Welsh] cannot benefit from leaving Wales.

Maybe the real answer is about economic opportunities – and the way that they drive a desire amongst students and their families to “escape” wherever they’re from in the search of better ones.

Back in March the Commons’ Welsh Affairs Committee held an evidence session on the impact of population change in Wales, focusing on the economic impact of younger people leaving the nation – ONS data points to a 24 per cent increase in over 75s while the working age population is projected to increase by 5.6 per cent.

The session heard from GlobalWelsh’s Walter May and Ambition North Wales’ Robyn Lovelock and discussed how economic investment could seek to retain young people, particularly given average earnings lag behind the rest of the UK.

There’s no report yet – the work fell under the bus of the General Election. But even if the report gets completed when the Welsh Affairs Committee is re-formed, it’s unlikely it’ll be recommending anything close to that which Dyfodol i’r Iaith seems to want.

Because ultimately, while Dyfodol i’r Iaith might regard the half a billion as a “waste”, I’m pretty doubtful that students and their families see it in quite the same way.