The story is not the problem, international education has a design problem

The answer that emerged over the hour was that the story is not really the problem – potentially awkward, but I think I styled it out.

The session immediately before mine from Chris Arnold (Made Impact) had made the case with real force. A coalition is being assembled to collect a million stories of the impact of international education and exchange, to leverage those stories and those data points into a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and to use the resulting authority to talk to politicians, philanthropists and the parents of the world’s future citizens in a way that the sector has failed to do.

It was passionate, well argued, and I have a lot of sympathy with the diagnosis that the benefits are overlooked within the corridors of power, and peripheral to the strategies of politicians.

But it rests on the assumption that what has gone wrong is a communications failure, and almost everything my four panellists said suggested somewhere else.

What Australia lost

Phil Honeywood from the International Education Association of Australia explained how a country loses its social licence, and none of it was about messaging.

A conservative government locked international students out during the pandemic and told them to go home, then opened the floodgates immediately afterwards with unlimited work rights and no consultation with the sector at all, which made Australia the place to come if what you wanted was three or four jobs and the cheapest available diploma.

Students were able to use a public university’s low-risk visa grading as a Trojan horse and then jump into any other course with any other provider after six months. Vice chancellors were on million-dollar salaries plus housing. Campuses acquired extraordinary new buildings that, as Honeywood put it, people drive past thinking “wow, look at the money that’s gone into that” without ever understanding that international tuition fees paid for it.

Those are not narrative failures. They are design failures, and the public noticed them because they were noticeable. The one genuinely narrative problem Honeywood identified was that net overseas migration in Australia now includes every New Zealander who walks in on citizenship rights – and something like fifty thousand British backpackers on three-year working holiday visas, uniquely exempted from the farm work requirement that applies to everyone else because an Australian trade minister was wooed by a British one.

The media has latched onto net overseas migration as a synonym for international students anyway.

Even there, the fix was structural rather than rhetorical, because what Australia has negotiated is an exemption from enrolment caps for universities that build purpose-built student accommodation, financed in large part by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and the Singapore Government Pension Fund.

The taxi driver test

I put the UK version of this to Charley Robinson from Universities UK International, because I have spent the summer training student leaders, and the part of the day I learn most from is the cab to the station.

Taxi drivers talk about international students unprompted, and while they are often warmly positive because international students are a large part of the business, the negative version has got more negative this year.

It used to be housing – the local market running hot, families unable to buy. Now it is jobs, and specifically the claim that international students are taking the entry-level work that a seventeen-year-old son or daughter would once have walked into, all in a country currently having a very loud argument about young people not in education, employment or training.

Robinson’s answer was honest about the limits of the storytelling approach. The benefits of international education are real and higher education is among the more geographically distributed industries in the UK, on a par with car manufacturing for export value and far better spread – but the benefits are not distributed evenly and they are not distributed equally in socioeconomic terms either.

Research and innovation impacts are abstract. Rents, bus routes and shift work are not. People are conditioned by rising inequality, by how they feel about universities generally, and by whichever effects they can see from their own front door, which means that the high-level economic impact arguments that work on policymakers don’t survive contact with constituents.

New Zealand has instruments, we have anecdotes

Natalie Lulia from Education New Zealand explained how the country opened its borders last and learned from watching everybody else, which she was refreshingly willing to describe as luck rather than genius.

But it has also been surveying New Zealanders’ perceptions of international education for more than ten years, which means the government agency responsible for growth knows, continuously and in numbers, what the public thinks and how that is moving.

Growth is explicitly not growth at any expense, the value of the sector has risen while student numbers sit below 2019 levels, and the minister released enrolment figures last week with a narrative deliberately built to head off the cash cow framing.

Twenty-two per cent of New Zealand’s forty thousand international students are in the school system, dispersed across the country and living with host families, which means that by the time they reach higher education they are already embedded in communities – the Australian equivalent is two per cent.

Every student, domestic or international, goes through a pōwhiri, a formal welcome that ends by signalling that the visiting group and the host group are now one. Education New Zealand is working on regional distribution because the overwhelming majority of international students land in Auckland, and it is doing that by asking what individual regions want rather than what the country wants.

Local licence, national levers

The obvious problem is that “social licence” is earned locally and every lever that shapes it sits in Westminster. I asked Robinson about this directly, because when Andy Burnham first won in Greater Manchester one of his bullet points was graduate retention, and mayors with coherent local politics are precisely the people capable of explaining a trade-off between migration, economic development and social cohesion back to their own communities.

Skills devolution is arriving. Higher education devolution is not, and visa policy certainly is not. Honeywood’s instinct was that this is where the regional argument has to go anyway – international students incentivised to study and stay in regions, apprenticeships opened up to them in a country where plumbers out-earn lawyers, anything that gives a regional politician something to point at other than Auckland, London and Sydney.

Meanwhile the numbers are moving fast enough to make the whole debate feel leisurely. Home Office student visas were twenty thousand down in August against the same month last year, which was itself down on the year before, and the January to August figure is roughly sixty-seven thousand down, which Robinson translated into something like £2.2bn of lost exports.

Her account of how we got here is a policy overshoot – the immigration white paper modelled seven thousand students here and twelve thousand there while radically underestimating what policy signalling does to student demand, to agent behaviour and to competitor countries, and nobody in government expected the post-pandemic surge to be anything other than a permanent expansion of the system.

The harms are the argument

Which brings me to the thing I often say about tourism. If you live in a city or a region that derives obvious benefit from visitors, the arguments for more of it make sense to you. If you do not, they do not, and no quantity of better storytelling changes which category your street falls into. That is why the sector reaching for the economic impact PDF, remembering to tag the social benefits onto the end of the sentence, has stopped working (if it ever did).

Joann Ng Hartmann from NAFSA was right that knowing your audience is everything and that data can be sliced whichever way tells the story you want, and she was right that the myth about international students displacing domestic ones is demonstrably false.

But a sector that treats every local grievance as a misunderstanding to be corrected has given itself permission never to fix anything. Even on benefits like international interaction and future world peace, we don’t know, in any systematic way, what international students actually do in the communities they live in, because when I ask what interactions they have I get folklore.

Some of the student leaders I met this summer told me they had spent no time at all with UK students, let alone anyone in the city, because of how they were housed and how much they had to work. Others described something rich. Nobody could tell me the distribution.

Ten years ago the idea of social licence arrived in Canada from New Zealand and struck Canadians as interesting but not applicable, because the immigration consensus there was assumed to be permanent. It was not.

The lesson? A licence never measured, never designed for and never tested is not a licence at all – it’s an assumption, and assumptions collapse.