International students are now a big part of the immigration story

The first was that on the volumes we’ve seen since 2019, even if every single international student returned immediately after their course concluded, the population growth has been substantial.

If a village of 100 people suddenly became a top destination for holidaymakers – resulting in 100 hotel bedspaces being built – if all of those bedspaces are full all of the time, you’re doubling the population of the place.

But the second is that while in the past the vast majority of international students returned, the postgraduate taught students who have made up most of the boom since 2019 look much more likely to have stayed.

That’s a story of what happens when the sector uses the behaviour of students in the past and the lag in data to justify recruitment. If your headline message is “they come here for education, not immigration”, when a boom driven by the offer of a post-study work visa then emerges in both coming and staying, you’re either kidding yourself or kidding the public.

And that catches up with you eventually.

In any event, as Michael Salmon noted earlier this week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has declined even to produce an additional metric on net migration that would have taken students out of the numbers.

And the quarterly immigration figures for year-end March 2024/25 published by the Home Office do underline the issue in the “story” of international students since 2019.

Boom and bust

The figures for the year ending March 2025 are a classic boom and bust – 403,497 sponsored study visas were granted to main applicants, 10 per cent fewer than in the year ending March 2024, but 50 per cent higher than 2019.

And dependants – and the decision to ban them on all but research programmes – look like the cause of that “bust”. In the year ending March 2025 there were only 18,411 visas issued to student dependants, 83 per cent fewer than the previous year, but still 15 per cent higher than 2019.

Most of the increase in international students between 2019 and 2023 has been from India and Nigeria. But numbers for these nationalities have fallen in the last 2 years, with Indian nationals decreasing 36 per cent between 2022 and 2024 and Nigerian nationals decreasing 68 per cent over the same period.

Indian nationals accounted for the highest number of sponsored study visas granted each year between the year ending September 2022 and year ending June 2024, but have now returned to second place behind Chinese nationals.

The bust doesn’t anything like as dramatic in this chart – which pretty vividly shows that we appear to have returned to the same numbers that we saw in 2022. The big difference – doubtless being celebrated in the Home Office – is that the levers it has pulled has taken numbers back to 2022 levels, just without the dependants swelling the overall figures.

And while it’s just too early to know what the impact on long-term migration will be, more recent student arrivals appear to be more likely to remain in the UK beyond their studies.

For the 2020 and 2021 cohort of student arrivals, 57 per cent and 59 per cent respectively still held valid or indefinite leave 3 years later – compared to 39 per cent in the 2019 cohort, and 34 per cent on average for students arriving between 2011 and 2018.

Meanwhile ONS’ long-term international migration figures – published for year ending December 2024 – explain the story. Whatever the arrival numbers, students who arrived on study visas are now the largest group leaving the UK.

In YE December 2024, 135,000 non-EU+ nationals who had originally arrived to study left the country – up from 114,000 in YE December 2023.

In other words, international students helped inflate net migration numbers during the post-COVID recovery – fuelled by pent-up demand and loosened visa rules – but are now playing a key role in bringing those numbers back down.

The real point for me is that neither the international education strategy nor the impact assessment at the time looked around the corner at what hitting the targets or the estimates might do to population growth.

But whether we look at numbers hoped for, predicted or eventually seen, international students have become a much more substantial part of the country’s immigration figures (and therefore story) than they ever were.

The unpredictability of the impact of policy lever pulling, and the lag in data, all mean that it’s very difficult to make a forward-looking case on numbers one way or another. But it remains the case that the sector’s success at hitting the international education strategy’s target much earlier than was ever envisaged has now come back to bite.