Student visa applications were up 15 per cent in December 2024

If you look back over monthly student visa application patterns for the last three years (ignoring dependants), December is typically the fourth or fifth most important month. It’s still nowhere near the volume of the Q3 summer months, but nor are we talking about tiny numbers, especially for institutions for whom the January admissions window is a large part of the business model.

Given all the doom and gloom about international recruitment – or glee, in certain corners of politics – the latest monthly Home Office figures showing a 15 per cent rise in applications if you compare the month of December 2023 with December 2024 might come as a surprise. We’re talking about main applicants only here – the increase is from 30,600 to 35,200.

All the usual caveats apply with this data: it only shows applications (not deposits or visa grants), there is no breakdown by institution, level of study, nationality, tariff group or anything like that. And the figures are provisional and subject to revision – though this has not happened since the data began to be released like this in April.

The kicker here is that declines in student applications for 2024 actually began in the autumn of 2023. If you were wanting to crudely try to assess the impact of the PGT dependants ban, really you should be comparing December 2022 (46,200 main applicants) with both December 2023 (30,600) and December 2024 (35,200). This would also not be a very rigorous comparison given other complicating factors such as far more disadvantageous exchange rates for students in countries like India and Nigeria.

Here’s the full picture that these monthly releases have garnered us:

[table id=388 /]

I haven’t included dependant visa applications as the picture is of course very different – you can find the full data tables here.

So in one sense it’s good news for the sector, as there’s a possible uptick in applicants for the January intake, and the headline news that total applications for the year were “only” 14 per cent lower than 2023 is much better than some of the more catastrophic predictions – though remember that the picture will indeed be a much steeper drop in certain institutions.

On the other hand a regular monthly drumbeat of stories about how badly international recruitment had been affected by callous Conservative policy changes was, you feel, helpful longer-term for those wanting to make their case to the new government. For example, the October monthly release picked up coverage in The Times, the BBC, the Independent, the Telegraph, the Standard, and elsewhere. While the data is far too provisional at this point to say anything concrete about the 2025 outlook, a few more months of slightly better figures than 2024 will see the tenor of reporting change.

And if you were worried that the monthly releases would dry up – the original intention was “until the end of 2024” and then for a review of user need – then good news, as the plan is now for the statistics to appear on a monthly ongoing basis.

Now a slight rise in applications for 2025 doesn’t compensate for the financial struggles that the current year is bringing – a survey from BUILA of 70 UK universities, also released today, says that September enrolments of international postgraduates were 20 per cent down on the previous year, with 80 per cent of institutions reporting a decline of some degree.