Home Office data on international applications – update for May and June
Michael Salmon is News Editor at Wonkhe
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The Home Office has published the latest monthly data for student visa applications. It’s the fourth drop of a new release intended either to allow for more timely analysis of migration figures or else to allow the previous government to quickly score political points, depending on your level of cynicism – there’s more background in our coverage of the first instalment.
As we’ve been following these releases, we’ve been stressing that these are only application figures – as I outlined for the figures published in May, both issuances and deposits are more important data points – and we don’t get anything on country or level of study as we do in the quarterly Home Office stats. These are also only provisional figures, due to how quickly they’ve been knocked together, and are rounded to the nearest hundred.
The key thing for the sector is to compare to the same point in last year’s cycle, before the dependants ban, as well as other issues complicating international recruitment such as economic crisis in Nigeria and the whole negative publicity that the MAC review generated.
So here we are:
| Main applicant 2024 | Main applicant 2023 | Dependant 2024 | Dependant 2023 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 87,300 | 105,200 | 11,100 | 55,800 |
| January | 25,500 | 26,900 | 3,400 | 17,500 |
| February | 3,700 | 5,200 | 1,700 | 7,500 |
| March | 4,800 | 7,800 | 1,600 | 7,900 |
| April | 9,600 | 9,500 | 1,600 | 6,000 |
| May | 15,500 | 16,900 | 1,400 | 7,800 |
| June | 28,200 | 38,900 | 1,400 | 9,100 |
We’re now on the cusp of the key visa application months of July, August and September (these months brought 312,500 main applicant applications last year). You wouldn’t want to plot a straight line from what’s happening in this data into these months – we could well have later applications this cycle due to Graduate route uncertainty and policy changes in other countries.
The plummeting of dependant numbers is to be expected following the PGT ban, and doesn’t have an immediate impact on universities’ finances – the question has always been how this would affect main applicant numbers (which the Home Office never released its modelling of, and it’s also not the only contributing factor in applications, as set out above).
But main applicants having dropped by 17 per cent in the first six months of the year is certainly an unwelcome indicator, even if a fall in international recruitment along these lines, or worse, is by now widely predicted.