Since 2010, the number of international students in the UK has increased by up to 70%, while entry to the most competitive universities has become more and more difficult. Meanwhile, the tuition fees paid by domestic students have fallen by more than a quarter in real terms, but for international students they’ve spiralled ever upward: they’re usually more than double the UK level.
It’s not hard to join the dots, and that’s what the Sunday Times did last weekend, claiming that international students were “buying their way in through secret routes”. This reminds me of the civil service joke that the best way to conceal the existence of a potentially embarrassing government policy is to publish it on the departmental website, since ascertaining the existence of “secret routes” into universities, or foundation courses as they are better known, doesn’t exactly require intrepid undercover journalism. These courses do have considerably lower entry requirements – they’re intended for both international students and domestic ones from disadvantaged backgrounds, to prepare them for the actual degree courses. The clue, obviously, is in the word “prepare”.
That said, there is a serious point here. Given the financial incentives, universities are indeed proactively recruiting international students, with foundation courses just one facet of this. But it’s hard to argue that British students are being excluded as a result. Since 2010, undergraduate numbers for both UK and international students have grown, and by roughly similar amounts. Nor is the picture different for the “top universities” the Sunday Times focuses on. The really big increase in international students has been at postgraduate level.
So international students don’t, overall, reduce opportunities for UK students – if anything, the opposite is true. With tuition fees at the present level, universities, on average, lose money on domestic students while running an even larger deficit on research. That money has to come from somewhere, and at the moment it comes from international students. All this is just accounting.
Therefore, while it’s hard to say exactly what the sector would look like without so many international students, the numbers suggest that it would be considerably smaller, with some universities becoming entirely unviable. At a time when “tradable services” – which include universities both directly, as service exporters, and indirectly, as an essential part of the wider ecosystem of finance, business services, consultancy and ICT – are one of the few bright spots in the UK economic landscape, it’s hard to argue this would make much sense.
Another criticism of international students relates not so much to their impact on universities or domestic students, but on the wider labour market. Since 2021, newly graduating international students have been able to apply for a graduate visa, which allows them and their dependents to stay here for two years, and to work in any job. Some critics, describing these as “Deliveroo visas”, say that many are likely to be working in low-paid jobs.
In fact, the evidence so far suggests that overall, recent migrants from outside the EU are moving up, not down, the pay distribution range. Within that, though, it wouldn’t be surprising if many recent graduates – like many recent UK-origin graduates – were working in low-paid jobs. But it’s not clear why this is a major problem. For those two years, they will be contributing to the economy by working and paying taxes, and indeed, the available data suggests they are doing just that. They seem to be restoring some of the flexibility in the UK market that was lost as a result of the end of the free movement of labour. And, after two years, they either have to move on to a skilled work visa or, as most are likely to do, leave the country. While there may well be some unintended consequences here – abuse of the system, and potential exploitation in some sectors – the basic design seems sound.
The real criticism of the current situation is not that international students are crowding out domestic ones, but rather that the whole system, ever more reliant as it is on the very high fees of international students, is unsustainable and unstable, and needs both structural reforms and an injection of new cash. The reduction in the value of domestic tuition fees has driven increases in the number of international students. Similar to the situation in the social care sector, the high levels of immigration flows needed to prop up the system provide a useful talking-point for politicians and commentators who think there are votes and clicks in xenophobia, as well as people who have much more reasonable concerns for the welfare of those who consume these services and those who work in them. But they are a symptom, rather than a cause, of systemic problems resulting from government policies of underfunding, combined with malign neglect.
Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant