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fatfox | 5 months ago

Yes I’d agree with that. International student income dropped, rounds of layoffs.

Some universities are better at optimising for rankings, see also REF research funding and how much effort and resources are spent on it, which varies by university: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/

discuss

cs02rm0|5 months ago

How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?

fatfox|5 months ago

I’m not sure where you’ve got the stats from, but student visas granted dropped since 2022, acc to UK gov (-5% in 2023, -14% in 2024).[0]

Combined with universities' increasing reliance on international student income (over the last years) and issues accessing research funding, this can get universities into trouble.

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

skippyboxedhero|5 months ago

Because universities borrowed staggering amounts of money and hired massive numbers of people.

The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government and university administrators it just seemed unlimited because there are no limits to resources, dangerous).

KaiserPro|5 months ago

Its a double whammy of EU students suddenly have to pay a lot more cash for a lot less certainty

but on the other end our political class fail to understand/sell that stopping international students means that we have to fund university education.

physicsguy|5 months ago

The big fall in income is nothing to do with Brexit, and it's worth saying that international students from within the EU paid the same as home students pre-Brexit.

What happened was a massive expansion to non-EU students paying the larger uncapped fees because of an expansion of student visas to allow (a) dependents to come (b) a route to staying in the UK. It led to over a million immigrants in one year, was massively criticised politically, and so got scrapped. There's no a lot of arguing that we should as a country remove/change the Indefinite Leave to Remain route because those graduates (and dependents) are from January starting to be eligible to apply and stay permanently.