The exploitation of international students begins before they enrol

Maybe you’ve realised that the course your agent was heavily pushing at you isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe the accommodation you thought you’d secured has fallen through.

Maybe you’ve clocked that the cost of living information your chosen university helpfully supplied is, in fact, three years old.

Maybe you’ve just… changed your mind.

Your big problem is that to apply in the first place, you almost certainly had to pay a hefty non-refundable deposit – 50 per cent of the fees in many cases.

And so unless you fit the fairly restrictive criteria for a refund in most policies, you either lose the money, or you’re locked in.

Or are you?

If you’re happy to stick around in the UK and you applied for a course in England, the Office for Students (OfS) is under a legal duty to monitor the availability of schemes for student transfers, the extent to which the arrangements are utilised by students generally or students of a particular description, and has to include references to that monitoring in its annual report.

In turn, OfS Condition F2 requires every registered provider to publish clear information about the transfer arrangements they offer – whether moving between courses at the same university or switching to another provider altogether.

The trouble is that when you ask, you’re told that the student transfer policy doesn’t apply to postgraduates, even though it should. And when you look up the OfS annual report, you just find a raw percentage figure – which does leave you assuming that nobody’s that bothered about facilitating transfers like yours.

You start to dig in a little. You find out that this time last year, two thirds (67 per cent) of providers told UUKi that they charged deposits for international students at a specific monetary amount, and 17 per cent were set at a percentage of the tuition fee.

You learn that universities were being encouraged to set earlier deadlines for applications and deposits, as a “helpful” way of managing risk – but all that’s done is make it much riskier for you, attempting to evaluate courses and universities from another country.

You also learn that universities were being encouraged in this way to reduce the likelihood of you transferring out of the degree programme due to the higher upfront cost. That doesn’t seem to square with the transfer duty.

Then you start to look into UK consumer protection law. You learn that under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, the university can levy a charge for cancellation, or early termination. But those charges must be limited to what is fair and proportionate. A fair amount is when the university recovers its genuine costs or lost profit – but a charge designed to punish you for changing your mind, or to scare you into staying in the contract, is unfair.

You email the university – and it argues that the CAS it allocated to you could have gone to someone else, so it’s lost the profit it would have made on you. When you ask if the university has actually recruited to its CAS allocation and ask for a detailed breakdown of its lost profits and costs as a result, you don’t get a response.

You suspect that’s because its numbers are down, and CMA is pretty clear that the university is only really able to retain money to cover actual costs/losses, not to enforce compliance targets or prevent student choice. The university isn’t allowed to shift the burden of its regulatory obligations or commercial risks onto you. But it looks like it has.

You dig in even further, and discover that under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC), some consumers will be vulnerable – either because of permanent characteristics such as age, disability or low literacy, or because of temporary circumstances like bereavement, financial stress, or life crisis.

Applying from abroad makes you feel pretty vulnerable in this context – and you learn that the law demands that the university designs its sales practices, contracts, and communications with your vulnerabilities in mind. It is no defence to say that the “average” consumer would cope – if a foreseeable group of people is likely to be misled, disadvantaged, or harmed, the practice breaches the Act.

You also learn about the duty of professional diligence, which requires the university to act with the skill, care, and honesty that a reasonable trader should exercise in line with good market practice. Breaching that duty becomes unlawful when it distorts, or risks distorting, your decision-making – a bar that drops further when the consumers in question are vulnerable.

In effect, the law outlaws practices that exploit your weakness, confusion, or lack of experience, even if no actual loss can yet be proven. You’ve just lost £5k for changing your mind about a course you’ve never enrolled onto.

You dig even further than that, and discover that OfS has even published a list of “prohibited behaviours”, one of which is about “requiring a student to pay a disproportionately high sum of money as penalty to the provider or for services which have not yet been supplied, where the student decides not to sign the contract or withdraws from the contract after signing it”. But then you learn that it doesn’t apply to your university yet.

You dig and you dig and you dig, and you discover that this all seems to be a live issue behind the scenes – in the consultation, in response to the bit on deposits, one respondent suggested that OfS should work closely with UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) to “agree a position on non-repayment of deposits for visa-sponsored students” – presumably because as per the Legal Migration white paper, it will soon be demanding a visa refusal rate of less than 10 per cent and a course enrolment rate of at least 90 per cent of CASs issued.

But you’re reminded that the university can’t shift the burden of its regulatory obligations or commercial risks onto you. You note that in its response, OfS argues that the prohibited behaviours it was proposing closely reflect existing legal requirements with which traders in any sector are required to comply.

So you email CMA, and it refers you to OfS. You email OfS, and are told that it “will not be able to update you on the progress or outcome of the issue that you have raised”. You email the OIA, and are told that you’re not yet a student so it can’t help.

You email your agent, but he’s on holiday – funded via three of the £5k that the university paid him to recruit you. You give up, vowing never to touch the UK with a barge pole again.