Would reversing the dependant ban save UK HE?

Let’s set aside the reality that barely any universities in the UK have accommodation of suitable quality and distance from campus that is suitable for students with families.

Let’s imagine that tuition fees on a given course in 2019 were £11,000.

If a student with a partner and two children were coming then, the standard visa fees (applied for from outside the UK, for over 6 months) were £1,392, and the immigration health surcharge would have totalled £1,200.

Let’s imagine the total cost of living for that family was £20,000 that year.

It’s a total of £33,592.

I’m ignoring the fees for getting onto the graduate route for now.

The country with the most significant dependant population during the post-Covid boom was Nigeria, and so the total was roughly equivalent to ₦15.45 million in 2019.

Here we are in 2025. Let’s imagine the tuition fees for the course are now £15,000. Your visa fees now total £2,096, and the IHS fee per person is now £776 per year, so £3,104 in total.

CPI means your cost of living is now about £25,000 a year.

That’s a total of £45,967 – in UK terms, a 37 per cent increase.

But in Naira terms, because of the devaluation of the currency, that’s ₦97,513,000.

That’s a 531 per cent increase.

I think I can argue that plundering what wealth there is in Nigeria on the basis of our reputation, only to spend most of the money propping up education for home students, would be as immoral as it is improbable.