Since the Budget, most of the noise about international students has been about the length of the Graduate route, the levy, and sponsor compliance ratings.
The settlement changes the Home Office confirmed on 2 November have had far less attention – even though, for students who hope to stay, they may matter more.
Time on Student and Graduate visas won’t count towards settlement, the ten-year long residence route that plenty of international graduates who stay have relied on is closing, and there’s no transitional protection for anyone who came expecting the old rules to apply.
In the Commons exchanges on the statement, nobody mentioned universities, graduates, or long residence.
The UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA) has now set out what it thinks the changes mean for students, and the Home Office’s research on how students and graduates view settlement suggests the rest of the sector may have underestimated how much it matters to them.
UKCISA calls the closure of long residence, and the inclusion of the Student and Graduate routes on the list of routes that won’t qualify for any pathway, “a significant and detrimental change” for students and graduates who are already working towards the ten-year mark. It also notes that the response offers no transitional protection for anyone it affects.
We have grave concerns about excluding lawful residence on routes such as the Student and Graduate route from the qualifying period for Earned Settlement – particularly for people who are already close to qualifying for indefinite leave to remain.
UKCISA also challenges the idea, set out in the response, that people who come “for study, post-study work or another time-limited purpose” shouldn’t build up settlement just by spending time on a temporary route. Long residence was never automatic, it argues, because reaching ten years means keeping lawful status throughout, complying with visa conditions, and paying significant application fees and immigration health surcharge along the way.
What it wants is pretty modest – lawful, continuous residence should still count for something whatever route someone arrived on, and at the very least there should be robust transitional protection for people already working towards settlement, who made long-term decisions in the “legitimate expectation” that the time they’d built up would be recognised.
In practice, the settlement clock now only starts once someone moves onto a qualifying route like Skilled Worker, so a student who arrives at 18, does a degree and a master’s, and then spends two years on a Graduate visa could have seven years in the UK with nothing to show for it before a standard ten-year wait even begins.
The quicker five-year path needs earnings of at least £50,271 in three of the previous five years, and none of the time spent studying counts towards it. We’ve set out the detail for SUs elsewhere, but in short, the Graduate route has become a holding pattern rather than a first step.
Alongside the response, the Home Office published targeted research and data tables from an online survey run in February and March that included 556 people sampled from the Student and Graduate routes – by the time they answered, around half had moved onto other visas and more than three quarters were in work.
The findings need handling with care, given a response rate of 0.7 per cent in that group and the report’s concession that people who thought the proposals could affect them may have been more likely to reply, but they all point the same way.
Almost half had considered other countries before choosing the UK, most often the US, Canada, and Australia. Of those who had thought about settling, 64 per cent first did so after they had arrived, and 80 per cent said they would probably or definitely apply under the current rules – but under earned settlement, only 31 per cent said they would apply, with 47 per cent unsure and 22 per cent saying they wouldn’t.
Asked whether they would still have chosen the UK if the qualifying period had been ten years when they applied, 45 per cent said no and 27 per cent said yes, while 59 per cent said they would stay five years or less without some form of settled status, against 16 per cent who would stay longer.
Among those paying basic rate tax, 61 per cent said it wouldn’t be feasible to move into a job paying more than £50,270 within a year, and among those unsure about or not planning to settle, slightly more were weighing a move to a third country than were thinking of going home – 53 per cent against 51 per cent.
The report concludes that those on Student and Graduate routes “appear particularly sensitive to changes that extend the time required to qualify for settlement” – and the 45 per cent were only being asked to imagine a ten-year qualifying period, not years of study and post-study work counting for nothing at all.
Timing is one reason the sector might have underplayed all this. If most students only start thinking about settlement once they’re here, it barely registers at the point of recruitment, whereas the Graduate route, compliance ratings, and the levy all move next year’s applications.
Another is the argument the sector has leaned on for years – that international students go home. It has been the case for taking them out of net migration, and the answer to those who say universities have been selling immigration rather than education, so defending long residence means conceding that plenty of students stay, and that those who do typically take around ten years to get there, very often via the route that’s now closing.
The irony is that the numbers now give the sector room to make the opposite case. Net migration fell to 171,000 in the year to December 2025, its lowest level since early 2021, and the 159,000 people who had originally arrived on study visas and left the UK that year made up 57 per cent of all long-term emigration by non-EU+ nationals. Meanwhile the fertility rate in England and Wales fell to a record low of 1.39 in 2025, with births at their lowest since 1977.
As James Coe argued earlier this month, there’s no path to a bigger economy with a shrinking workforce – and graduates the UK has already educated, who have lived here for years and want to stay, are about the easiest version of that argument the sector could make. What it has lacked is the confidence to make it, rather than relying on the students who leave to keep the numbers down.
The other is that settlement has mostly been framed as a staff issue. When Universities UK responded to the Budget, it welcomed the “expansion of the Graduate visa” without touching on what happens when the visa runs out.
Its joint evidence with the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) to the Home Affairs Committee last December made a strong case that “the prospect of permanent settlement strongly influences candidates’ decisions to work in the UK”, and that changing the rules on people already on a route would be “inherently unfair” – but it made that case for staff, and the Student and Graduate routes didn’t feature.
Yet those arguments apply just as well to students, because if settlement prospects shape the choices of an academic weighing up Manchester against Melbourne, they shape the choices of the master’s student making the same comparison a few years earlier – who is quite often the same person on their way to becoming that academic.
The first changes are due to be laid in December’s immigration rules and implemented over the course of 2027, so there’s a short window. UKCISA’s asks on transitional protection and lawful residence are an obvious place to start, alongside others that a government claiming to want international talent might accept – counting time on a UK PhD, or counting earnings made on a Graduate visa towards the earnings history.
Universities have something to do closer to home too, because plenty of what applicants and offer holders are being told about studying, working, and staying in the UK will now be out of date – and if the Home Office’s survey is anything to go by, settlement weighs on their plans rather more than the sector’s lobbying has assumed.
International students’ fees make up almost a quarter of universities’ income and are keeping the lights on across much of the sector – the least it could do in return is argue for their futures a little more publicly.