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But is the government listening?
“Policy objectives on immigration and university funding should be considered alongside each other,” a new briefing from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change suggests:
Any serious conversation about student migration must recognise that, under the current higher education funding model, there are trade-offs in balancing these two goals.
While there are few in the sector who would disagree – you might even use words like “blindingly” and “obvious” – it’s notable that arguments for joined-up thinking on international student numbers have repeatedly failed to cut through, with the run-up to the recent immigration white paper dominated by the same horsetrading between DfE and the Home Office as all the other announcements under the Conservatives.
So seeing the argument made by an influential Labour consultancy-cum-think tank will raise hopes it might start to stick a bit more in future – or at least inform debates around the mooted fee levy and the wider HE reform planning. TBI’s call for ten-year research budgets in 2023 led fairly directly to the manifesto, even if what is emerging out of DSIT will be quite a distance from the ten-year settlement for UKRI as a whole that the first New National Purpose report set out, and which Peter Kyle promised at the 2023 Labour conference shortly afterwards.
Today’s briefing leans in to the differentiated impact across the sector of both falling numbers as a whole and the white paper exhortations for institutions to move away from “risky” markets.
The impact of both the changes enacted by the previous government and these latest reforms will not be uniformly felt, with the post-1992 institutions more likely to be affected… The universities with the least [financial] headroom, or deficits, are often vital to local opportunity in less wealthy places outside London and the South East.
The Sutton Trust’s recent Opportunity Index gets a shout-out for having demonstrated that the lowest-ranked areas for opportunity are often “the very places where post-1992 universities often provide the main route to higher education and local employment.” Modern universities look to have picked up an unlikely ally.
So what’s to be done about it? This briefing is more of a conversation starter, with more likely to come from TBI on concrete recommendations. Aside from thinking about funding reform alongside immigration policy, the only specific takeaway is the suggestion that digital ID cards (a recurring TBI hobbyhorse) can help tackle “concerns about overseas students who break the conditions of their stay.”
But the sector will be fairly pleased to see an influential, Labour-adjacent organisation doing some awareness-raising, and stressing that the current funding model in England “cannot absorb a sudden drop without serious implications for institutional viability, course provision and regional access to higher education.”
Though a strong case can be made that this “sudden drop” has already happened, and these implications are in the process of being realised in many contexts. The briefing positions itself as a warning to Labour about the effects of the white paper on overall student numbers. This does presuppose that total recruitment figures will play along with this narrative – as I said back in December, the fact of overall applications showing signs of ruder health presents a campaigning challenge for the sector, even if welcome financially.
We’ve now had six successive months where student visa applications by main applicants (that is, fee-paying international students) have been up on twelve months prior, with the overall figures for 2025 thus far not dissimilar to the boom years of 2022 and 2023. We spotted an example of this rebound cutting through to policymakers in remarks from science minister Patrick Vallance to a parliamentary committee last week:
Universities that have become very dependent on overseas students are now finding a difficult situation, but I heard that the numbers are going up again in some places because, obviously, there are other [countries] that are becoming less attractive for overseas students at the moment. It is a bit difficult to know which way that will go.
While the immigration white paper contained measures that would – as intended – damp down certain kinds of student recruitment, the overall trend is less clear when weighed up against policy changes in competitor countries, in particular how unattractive to international students the USA is making itself. A notable rebound in summer recruitment will complicate the argument that TBI wants to make, and that the sector wants to make, that fixing home student funding can’t be put off any longer. The government may think that the system can hobble on a bit further yet.