On 31 January 2024, we celebrated the fourth anniversary of Brexit. Well, not very many people were celebrating. It is quite telling that the three Brexit-related story during its Birthday week were all about damage or damage limitation, not Brexit benefits. Chris Grey’s latest blog post discusses the three big events in detail: the stalling of the UK-Canda trade negotiations (probably a good thing for most British farmers, but contradicting Brexiter promises on easy new trade deals), the entering into force of additional import controls on goods from the EU (for which the government and border control posts are clearly woefully unprepared – despite having had four years to get ready), and a breakthrough in Northern Irish power sharing (although that is only solving problems that would not have existed without Brexit). The Brexit mood in the country is low.
Recent polls suggest that a majority (57%) of British people believe Brexit has been more of a failure than a success, and a similar proportion think it was wrong to leave the EU, against only 33% thinking it was right. According to a Financial Times survey, 75% of companies trading with the EU consider Brexit has hurt them. David Frost feels ‘Remainers have never been stronger’ (of course he thinks that‘s a bad thing), and even the IEA thinks Brexit was a mistake.
A video from May 2016 by Daniel Hannan was widely shared on social media showing the stark contrast between what we were promised back in 2016 and where we are at in 2024. Indeed, rather than sunlit uplands, Britain in 2024 feels closer to a dystopian desolate scene from the London-based horror flick ’28 Days Later…’ That may actually be an apt analogy, 1,461 days later it is becoming clear that Brexit is not a one-off mistake – say, like betting on the wrong horse, which hurts once but then stops. Rather, it is like a virus that turns people into zombies. Once unleashed, it spreads, mutates, and infests ever new areas of our lives.
The latest case in point is UK Higher Education (UKHE) which, it would seem, Brexiters have made the next target of their desperate attempts to cling on to power. For months now, they have deployed Brexitist nationalistic culture-war propaganda tools to politicise one of the country’s most successful export industries.*
The right-wing populist animosity against ‘lefty academics’ – especially in the social sciences and humanities – certainly is a key cause for sustained attacks on the quality of university education in the UK. This has led in July last year to the government launching a policy allegedly cracking down on ‘rip-off university degrees.’ The latter are simplistically defined as degrees with high drop out rates and low graduate salaries – completely neglecting the blatantly evident factors that explain why some very valuable degrees for social mobility in the country may lead to less well-paying jobs or may have more students who are struggling on them.
A less obvious but increasingly important cause for UKHE to come under attack – perhaps surprisingly for people not familiar with the sector – is the dramatic post-Brexit increase of net migration figures. Migration has been a Tory obsession for decades and consecutive manifestos have promised to reduce net immigration dramatically. The Brexit referendum was won to no small degree due to fears over and promises about immigration levels. Given that Brexit has not delivered on these promises, our struggling Prime Minister is desperate to have something to show for all the government’s rhetoric about ‘delivering for the people.’ But the ‘Stop the Boats‘ three-word slogan stubbornly refuses to turn into a functioning policy. So, foreign students have become the new target for the Tories to try and avert an increasingly likely defeat in the next general election (GE)…As a result Brexitism has spread to higher education, quite possibly wrecking yet another sector of the UK economy (after fishing, farming, transport, finance…).
UKHE in the age of nationalism
For context, since the reforms of UK university funding introduced in 2012 by David Willetts under the coalition government, UK universities almost exclusive depend on student fees to finance themselves. The reform uncapped student numbers and allowed universities to triple undergraduate tuition fees. According to one study from 2016, it reduced “public spending on university teaching by around £3 billion a year and enabled tuition fee income to rise from £2.6 billion to £8.1 billion.” Yet, undergraduate fees for home students are caped and while since 2017 they are meant to increase with inflation, so far consecutive governments have temporarily frozen the cap of £9,250. This has meant universities have massively expanded their post-graduate programmes to attract overseas students whose fees are uncapped. Given the UK ‘s world-leading (yes, genuinely!) universities, the attractiveness of the UK for students who want the ‘Hogwarts experience,’ and the English language, this plan worked very well for over a decade. The post-graduate taught (PGT) sector expanded, universities made enough money to finance their operations and invest in new buildings for even more PGT students; They hired new staff, opened new campuses both in the UK and abroad. The sector grew…The Tories are about to push a pin in that balloon!
Turning the screw on foreign students is an easy way to bring down the ‘net migration’ headline figure. Indeed, contrary to the Rwanda plan, it is a policy that will actually have a real-world effect. A few changes to visa rules are sufficient to turn the flow into a drip. The government did just that in January when rule changes about ‘dependent visas’ came in to force that prevent foreign students from brining their families to the UK while studying here. There is also a decision expected on whether or not the government will – once again – restrict or even abolish graduates’ rights to obtain a work permit after graduating from a UK university. Such a post-study work visa (PSWV) existed until 2012 when it fell victim to then Home Secretary Theresa May‘s ‘hostile environment‘ policy. It was reintroduced by Jo Johnson in 2019 (taking effect in July 2021) – seemingly delivering a Brexit benefit that Hannan had written about, i.e. letting more foreign students in now that we did not have all the Europeans coming here using their freedom of movement. If that was a Brexit benefit, it may turn out to be a short-lived one.
This comes at a time where other attractive Anglosphere countries like the US and Australia open their boarders for foreign students offering them very attractive visa conditions, including post-study work visas with no time limit on employment after graduation. (Canada, on the other hand is going down the UK route: blaming international students for housing shortages, and restricting numbers). As a result, student flows to the UK are drying up, leaving many universities in very difficult financial positions. The government is doing real damage to UKHE.
Whatever one may think of the commodification of education and the very high fees students must pay for education, UKHE is one of the most successful service export sectors the country has produced. It contributes £130bn to the UK economy, with an estimated £41.9bn through foreign students. Many of its universities are truly world-leading and very attractive places for people to study and do research. The spread of the Brexit virus to this sector risks turning it into a walking dead.
Mickey Mouse and parasites
At first glance, the government ‘s approach to foreign students seems puzzling. After all, foreign students pay twice the fees of their UK counterparts and thus cross-subsidies home students; they also contribute to the national and to local economies by spending money while living here; and they contribute to the Welfare state through the Immigration Health Surcharge of £470 per year. The living costs for studying one year in London – excluding fees – is currently estimated at around £16,000; around £12,000 outside of London. That’s £16,000 pounds per student spent on goods and services from UK companies, shops, restaurants, clubs, cinemas, museums, theatres, venues, stadiums.
Moreover, while it is undeniable that foreign students constitute an important source of immigration, surely that should be welcomed. They have been educated in UK universities, acquired high skill levels, and can make an important contribution to the UK economy, which suffers from low productivity notably due to the lack of a skilled workforce. So, at first glance, the case against foreign students seems a very difficult one to make…
…and yet, the Brexit virus manages to turn something that even the most anti-intellectual Brexiter should celebrate – a world-leading export industry delivering world-leading services to its clients (to put it in terms these people can relate to) – into something toxic. Where I see bright young people full of enthusiasm eager to broaden their horizons and learning about Britain; Brexiters see parasites that come here to take our houses, eat our food, crowd our trains, and take our jobs. Where I see an incredible richness of cultures, experiences, histories, and values fostering mutual understanding and new ways of thinking; Brexiters see invasion, contamination, and impurity. Where I see the leaders of tomorrow; they see a threat. The Brexit virus has mutated again and is turning juicy meat into putrefied lumps of flesh.
To make the case against foreign students, the latest mutation of the Brexit virus has taken different forms. One rhetorical strategy adopted by Brexiters is to try and undermine the credibility of UKHE by questioning the quality of education provided and suggesting ulterior motives. For years now we have heard about “Mickey Mouse degrees” that allegedly do not provide value for money. That is true only if ‘value’ is defined in the crudes way as graduate salary (if that!). From a Brexiter’s perspective, however, this strategy kills two birds with one stone: ‘Mickey Mouse degree’ refers not only to the quality of education provided, but often also to the substance of certain subject areas (everything with ‘critical’ in the title for instance or social sciences and humanities in general). So, attacking universities in that way hurts Brexiters’ two pet hates: immigrants and intellectuals.
The narrative that has become dominant, then, is this: Universities offer Mickey Mouse’ degrees of little value for no other reason than attracting students to make money at the expense of domestic students. The latter come here not so much to study, but rather as an easy way of entering the country, to which they will bring their whole family on a dependent visa. Once here, they occupy houses, seats on public transports, and slots at the local GP practice, and go on to steal our jobs.
The Sunday Times added a new line of attack a couple of weeks ago, by more directly victimising British nationals, (falsely) alleging that universities accept foreign students on lower grades than Brits have to achieve in order to make more money. Various university organisations replied immediately, the Russell Group of elite universities‘ response pointed out that the fundamental flaw of the article was that it did not distinguish foundation year courses from full degree courses. Foundation year courses are designed to help foreign students to catch up with their counterparts before joining a regular degree. Admitting students on lower grades is the very point of these programmes and does in no way limit availability of places for home students. Nor are these courses somehow a murky ‘back door’ – as the article in true conspiratory populist style suggests – that universities do not want the public to know about. They are of course openly and widely advertised.
Another fundamental omission in the Times’ piece, however, is that British university’s dependence on foreign students was a (Tory) government choice. After the Willets reform, which cut public funding to the sector by £3bn, relying on foreign PGT students has become the only way for universities to fund their activities. Importantly, the money foreign students pay is what allows UK universities to offer home students much lower fees. Rather than squeezing home students out of university places, overseas students’ subsidies them.
Contrary to the Brexiter world view of cruel competition for a pie of a fixed size and hence a problem of excessive demand, high demand and hence revenues made it possible to increase the pie by investing and increase supply to satisfy both domestic and international demand.
Shockingly, the Times piece led the Department for Education to announce an investigation into university recruitment practices. In other words, the government lets its policy decisions be dictated by a poorly researched and fundamentally flawed piece of ideological journalism in a Murdoch-owned newspaper.
This is not to deny problems and abuse of student visas. Some years ago, London Met temporarily lost its ability to sponsor student visas when the UK Border Agency found irregularities with the visa status of a quarter of London Met students. Also, a Panorama investigation found fraudulent activities around English language tests needed to extend student visas that were used to work in the UK illegally. Yet, since then rules have been toughened very considerably to tackle that problem. Universities have a legal obligation to keep close taps on their students, monitor their attendance, and have regular in persons meetings to confirm people on visas have not gone AWOL. The government has also introduced the so-called Prevent duty that forces universities to provide training to faculty to make them attentive to possibly problematic students in national security terms. Falling foul of these rules is an existential threat for universities, which is why – in my experience at several UK universities, albeit rather good ones – they take them very seriously.
Similarly, there may indeed be cases where students compete with the local population for scarce habitations and perhaps even GP appointments. Yet, the solution to that problem surely has got to be to finally sort the UK’s dire housing market – an ocean of failures to which foreign students contribute the tiniest of drops. Similarly, in all but exceptional circumstances, students – in their late teens early 20s for the vast majority – will hardly require a massive amount of medical treatment while in the UK. Indeed, they are part of an age group that health insurers typically see as good risks, precisely because they contribute without requiring services. Only in Brexit Britain can anyone seriously suggest that they are the cause of the massive problems the NHS is facing.
Ironically for the party that coined the term ‘anti-growth coalition,’ just like with immigrants, Brexiters are trying to convince the British people that the UK’s problem when it comes to housing, health services, jobs, etc. is one of excessive demand, rather than one of insufficient supply due to underinvestment. That narrative fuels the ‘othering’ which fans the flames of populism. In policy terms, it leads populist governments to look for solutions aimed at reducing demand, rather than fix the problems of underinvestment that lead to undersupply. That is not surprising, of course, given that those in power are the root cause of the problem. Indeed, what Britain is really suffering from is renteerism and corruption at the top, not parasitism at the bottom. Fixing this problem would require extensive reforms and redistributing the countries resources more evenly. If closed borders are to be part of the solution, then it should be closed borders for the super-rich and the non-doms to prevent them from expatriating the nation’s wealth and avoid paying taxes to the country that made them rich. Attacking foreign students is the latest strategy these people have found to deflect the public’s attention from who the real parasites are.
No plan
Back in 2016 – on June 21 to be precise – Hannan drew a rosy picture of what post-Brexit UKHE would look like: “Our universities are flourishing, taking the world’s brightest students and, where appropriate, charging accordingly. Their revenues, in consequence, are rising, while they continue to collaborate with research centres in Europe and around the world. The number of student visas granted each year is decided by MPs who, now that they no longer need to worry about unlimited EU migration,** can afford to take a long-term view.”***
In 2024, many universities are facing deficits – and some financial collapse. Indeed, the Willetts university funding system only works when there is a considerable inflow of foreign students. In a 2011 interview, David Willetts explicitly mentioned US universities’ ability to attract foreign students as one aspect UKHE should emulate. As such, the system is incompatible with the Tories’ obsession with cracking down on immigration. At the same time, the Tories’ other obsession with reducing public spending means that compensating universities for reduced fee income through increased public spending on higher education is not an option. Universities are caught in the middle of these obsessions.
Again, rather than working on developing a funding system that is compatible with both fiscal austerity and closed borders, the government’s answer is rationing and artificially reducing demand and access to higher education. Thus, the government’s response to the 2019 Augar review of university funding essentially consisted in rationing higher education by considering controls on student numbers through increased eligibility criteria for student loans. The latter idea, seems to have been abandoned for now after consultation. As far as I am aware, there is currently no plan for university funding. Whether or not universities will go out of business is – just like in the case of fisheries, farms, transport enterprises – not even an afterthought for the people in power. Rather than taking ‘a long-term view’, the PM focusses on short-term policies aimed solely at reducing net immigration numbers and thus save his own political future.
From a student perspective, if the government were controlling overseas student numbers merely by granting fewer visas each year – as Hannan suggests –, that would be a great improvement over the current situation. You may not get one of the visas, but if you did, you could plan your future and possibly benefit from very attractive conditions. What the government does instead is trying to control student numbers indirectly by making the UK unattractive, limiting, or removing dependent visas and post-study work opportunities. In the process, the government creates uncertainty, and the UK gets a reputation for constantly moving the goal posts and thus making it impossible to know what you will get once you graduate.
I’m writing these lines as I’m sitting on a plane back to Heathrow from Hyderabad (IND) where I attended an international studies fair. The contrast between the queues at US universities’ stalls and the empty chairs at the UK ones was shocking and depressing. A huge change from just a couple of years back when many Indians preferred to study in the UK – for cultural, historical, but often also family reasons (having aunts, uncles, and cousins in the UK). Brexiters will rejoice of course. Rather than invading our country, foreign students are now invading the US and Australia.
Trading blows
The attack on foreign students is all the more astonishing as it directly contradicts the avowed Brexiter strategy to trade more and trade with non-EU countries after Brexit. The vast majority of overseas students come from precisely those countries that the UK wants to establish stronger trade ties with, i.e. Commonwealth countries and countries in the Pacific region – India and China, but also Nigeria. As such, erecting de facto trade barriers for education service exports (by making it difficult or unattractive for foreign students to come here and consume those services) is another post-Brexit trade policy failure.
I have written about Brexiter trade fantasies extensively on this blog when it comes to trade in goods. I have not written so much about trade in services. A recent study by Rob Springford re-visits two apparent post-Brexit trade paradoxes, which consist of UK’s trade with EU and non-EU countries to move in parallel and the fact that UK service exports outperform all other G7 countries. I have written about the former in a previous post.
Regarding the second paradox – the UK’s service export outperforming that of other G7 countries – Springford notes that given that the UK’s economy is much more service dominated (or in other words deindustrialisation has been worse) than other G7 countries, given increasing demand for services, its service exports should have increased more than they did. So, once again it is about choosing ‘the right counterfactual,’ i.e. what should we compare the UK’s post-Brexit service trade performance with? The answer is not Germany, France, the G7, or Britain six years ago, but Britain today had Brexit not happened.
Doing that, Springford challenges the view that Brexit has not affected service trade. According to him, finance and transport services have been particularly hard hit. The reason for this is that these two sectors are strongly integrated inside the EU, which means higher barriers have been erected for third countries.
Education is not one of those highly integrated sectors. Non-EU universities are free to provide their services to EU citizens as much as they like. So, UKHE does not have to suffer from post-Brexit downturn in trade. Yet, the government’s immigration policies make sure that here too we impose economic sanctions on ourselves in the name of sovereignty and nationalism. As such, student visa policies are not unlike the new border control on food and fresh produce imports from the EU. Like the import controls, which will probably lead to shortages of certain goods, barriers for foreign students will lead to a shortage of customers for UK universities who crucially depend on them as a source of funding.
More generally, post-Brexit trade policy has not delivered what we were promised. Kemi Badenoch was at pains last week to explain why we still do not have a trade deal with the USA (she blamed it on Joe Biden). Targeting foreign students too has a negative effect on the government’s post-Brexit trade strategy. One of the key reasons why we still do not have a trade deal with India is that India insisted on more student visas for Indian nationals, which our government could not agree to. So far, the ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ has been hampered by North Atlantic isolationist fantasies.
Brexiter sadomasochism
Four years into real existing Brexit, Brexiters boosterism and bluster has mutated into a new form of Brexiter sadomasochism where Brexiters simply ask Brits to accept the pain in the name of freedom. Following the introduction of the new border checks last week, Jacob Rees-Mog on GB News lectured a farmer about the impact of Brexit on his business. Andrea Ledsome suggests the UK should grow its own flowers; and one FT reader commenting on an online article that suggested, bacon, avocados, carrots, and apple may be the first foodstuff to be in short supply by suggesting “Bacon is bad for you, avocados mainly come from LatAm and honestly if people can’t grow carrots and apples here.” (I am not 100% sure this comment was not meant sarcastically).
There is little hope that UKHE can expect any better. Indeed, it is unsurprising that Brexiters are relaxed about the impact of immigration rules on UKHE. After all, it is a sector full of ‘woke’ and ‘lefties.’ Plus, the more education people get, the less likely they are to watch GB News, vote Tory, or Reform UK. So, destroying UK universities may be killing two birds with one stone.
As 1,461 days later the Brexit virus’s latest mutation has infected UK higher education, it is to be hoped that the decreasing support of Brexitism in the British population will soon lead to some form of immunity.
*Some readers may be disturbed by me talking about higher education as an industry, as it may suggest I buy into the discourse of commercialisation of education where students become consumers and universities commercial enterprises. I certainly do not think that transformation of UKHE has been beneficial to the quality of teaching and learning in UK universities. However, I feel it is appropriate to adopt these terms here for two reasons: For one, it is largely a reality that UK universities are run – and have to be for reasons of policy choices – as quasi-commercial enterprises that seek to generate income from fees and research grants. As such, they have developed large marketing departments that help them follow market trends (not pedagogical or societal considerations) when designing programmes that are to be sold on the domestic and international markets. Again, that is not necessarily a good thing (although it has some advantages), but it is a reality. For the other, I purely focused on the economic side of UKHE, because I feel it is the only aspect Brexiters would accept matters. But of course, I would very strongly agree that destroying UK universities has far-reaching consequences for the country ‘s intellectual leadership, the advancement of arts, culture, and science in the UK and internationally.
** I’m not commenting on the fact that the trade-off that Hannan and other commentators suggest exists between letting in overseas students or other types of immigrants from other countries only exists due to the Tories’ obsession with net migration figures and due to their fear that our country cannot cope with current numbers of immigrants. Nothing is less certain than that assertion. Rather, giving an ageing population and labour shortages, the British economy seems to be craving an influx of workers with various skill levels. Only if the number of non-student immigrants did indeed impose a cap on foreign students, because there is an absolute number of immigrants above which the country cannot go, does the temporary increase in overseas students after 2016 constitute a ‘Brexit benefit‘ as the Spectator‘s Mary Mitchell seems to suggest
*** Hannan ‘s last sentence reveals either the usual ignorance or the bad faith so common among Brexiters: Deciding the number of student visas each year, precisely is not taking the long-term view. Universities – like any business – need certainty about future rules in order to plan investments and strategies. Changing student numbers every year makes that impossible creating very considerable risks.