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His latest move is to halt student visa applications pending examination of their social media posts so that they can be more thoroughly vetted. It’s temporary, but will inevitably send a chill through would-be students, and make them consider applying elsewhere. The natural “elsewhere” is the UK.
It’s a politically contentious issue, but the new Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, made it clear last summer that students were welcome. “Be in no doubt,” she said, “international students are welcome in the UK. This new Government values their contribution – to our universities, to our communities, to our country.”
But it is probably most helpful to stand back and see universities as an industry that has grown very rapidly since the 1950s, but which is now moving at best to a steady state and quite possibly a structural decline.
A further factor is falling birth rates. The Office for National Statistics reports that there were 591,072 live births in England and Wales in 2023, the lowest since 1977. The total fertility rate, the average number of children born to a woman, fell to 1.44, the lowest level since records began in 1938. So the supply of British-born youngsters will continue to shrink for the next couple of decades, maybe longer.
To be clear, higher education does not face a challenge on the scale that manufacturing had to confront from the 1970s onwards. But to put the point bluntly, if its domestic market will shrink, as seems inevitable, it has to boost its exports. That is where the attack on US universities may turn out to become a bit of a lifeline.
Welcomed, not resented
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As far as the first is concerned, these are all the issues noted by Phillipson in that speech last year, in particular that “their fees welcomed, but their presence resented”. But properly managed, as the Government is seeking to do by creaming off those that might otherwise have gone to the US, some further rise in international students should surely be both possible and socially acceptable.
Take the latest Times Higher Education study. The UK has three universities in the top ten, the US seven. The other rankings, for example from US News and World Report, are much the same. While the QS ranking has universities in Zurich and Singapore pushing some US colleges down the league table, the UK actually has four in its top 10: Imperial, Oxford, Cambridge and UCL.
One of the many problems that anyone writing about the future of universities has to contend with is the emotional attitude many people seem to have towards them. I really find that most unhelpful, because it confuses the whole debate.The whole business of UK fees is a good example of that. Should they go up faster? Well, not if rising fees have been a driver for the decline in the proportion of school-leavers going to university since 2022.
What about the evidence in a Commons briefing document that for some cohorts of students, only 27 per cent will repay their loans in full and that the Government’s changes to the student loans system should increase that to 65 per cent? In any other walk of life, even a 65 per cent repayment rate would be terrible. Are we training a generation of young people that you don’t need to pay off your debts?
Brand matters
All this is confusing. The central point, surely, is that it’s really difficult to go from a growth market to a declining one, and that in a way universities are lucky in that they have a global competitive advantage. Those rankings (started, incidentally, by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai) may be distorted and unhelpful in their details, but my word they matter if you want to get the best students. The language matters, which is why many European colleges are teaching in English. Brand matters too. And most of all, students matter.
The same applies to Oxford (Phillipson is an alumna), Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and so on. Even those of us who studied elsewhere – I was hugely lucky to do my economics at Trinity College Dublin – have to acknowledge that.
This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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