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I hear that across the country, a whole number of universities are panicking not just about the number of international students that have been (or are being for January) recruited, but also higher than usual volumes of students not paying their fees by any deadline that might have applied in October or November.
It’s not hard to understand why. Inflation has been through the roof. Student rents are rising higher. University cost of living information is routinely out of date and often completely misrepresents how expensive the UK is to live in.
I’ve heard enough stories of misrepresentations and in some cases downright lies from agents on the subject to write a book. Increases in visa fees and the NHS surcharge won’t have helped.
And the Home Office doesn’t help either – it says that international students need to show they have enough money to support themselves – but has been saying that means £1,334 per month (for up to 9 months) for courses in London or £1,023 per month (for up to 9 months) for courses outside London since 2020. There’s not a lot of evidence that that was do-able three years ago – it almost certainly isn’t now.
For those students whose universities cannily got the paperwork sorted early who’ve since experienced currency shocks, the “sunk costs” misery of choosing between a whopping non-refundable deposit being lost or seeing if they can scrape by is an especially bleak either/or – and is bound to be a decent explanation for the disproportionate use that international students are making of food banks and pantries that students’ unions tell me about.
I suspect there’s a few things that would help – other than regulating agents better, increasing the financial requirement and being much more honest about contemporary cost of living challenges:
Hardship fund availability: It’s quite astonishing to me that several universities still aren’t offering hardship funding at all, and perhaps worse that some universities are asserting to their students’ unions that they’re not allowed to because of the “no recourse to public funding” rule. They’re international – not stupid.
Hardship fund framing: Aside from the headline warnings on plenty of webpages that there are “limited funds” or that a student must be in an “emergency”, the majority suggest that a student must have experienced a significant “change of circumstances”. Most international students wouldn’t twig that being lied to (at least by omission) by all and sundry would count – and indeed in many cases the Ts and Cs suggest that it wouldn’t. A bit of discussion with those that are facing the problem would help explain it and help reframe those messages.
Instalments: At my last count about 20 universities offered monthly instalments. If it’s the case that students are appearing, and then having paid the rent (often upfront) and tried to eat are then funding their lives through (often highly precarious) work, this feels like a no-brainer.
Threats: The surefire way to ensure that students go to ground, refuse to talk and fail to reach out is to threaten them with the removal of campus access or worse, exclusion and deportation given that students are already suspicious of the way in which universities act as an arm of the state for immigration purposes. As UUKi notes here, students are bound to be concerned that telling the university that they are in financial hardship may affect their visa status. Deploying the big rent font, capital letters and the letters UKVI are going to make that worse, not better.
Costs: I would say this, but revisiting the reasons why student life has become so expensive and putting in place proper strategies to get the costs down haven’t become less important just because everyone lost interest in the working group. Segmenting fresh focus group work by student characteristic will help with the APP if you’re in England – and will help the fees get paid wherever you are.