UK universities face the risk of falling student numbers as a result of government immigration curbs

SEVERAL universities in the UK are now facing the risk of falling into financial deficit due to the massive decline in international students following the government's new policy of placing a ban on pupils bringing dependants into the country.

Under controversial plans to limit the number of migrants entering the country, the UK government of prime minister Rishi Sunak has placed a blanket-ban on the families of all foreign students entering the country. Nigerian students are expected to be among the most severely affected by the new law which states that only those doing post-graduate research or government-sponsored scholarship students will be exempted from the new law.

A Home Office spokesman said: “We are fully committed to seeing a decisive cut in migration. From today, new overseas students will no longer be able to bring family members to the UK. Postgraduate research or government-funded scholarships students will be exempt.”

However, the chief executive of Universities UK, Vivienne Stern, who represents more than 140 universities, said the sector was facing the prospect of a serious over-correction, thanks to immigration policies that deterred international students from coming to study in Britain. Her plea came as it emerged that some top universities, including York, which is a member of the elite Russell Group, were being forced to soften their entry requirements in order to maintain numbers of overseas students.

Ms Stern said: “If they want to cool things down, that’s one thing but it seems to me that through a combination of rhetoric, which is off-putting, and policy changes , they have really turned a whole bunch of people off that would otherwise have come to the UK.  The government needs to be very careful or we could end up with, from a policy point of view, what I would consider a serious over-correction.”

With the £9,250 domestic tuition fee effectively frozen for the past decade, UK universities have increasingly relied on non- European Union (EU) students to make ends meet, with their fees now accounting for nearly 20% of sector income. Universities are warning privately that numbers have softened sharply this year following a series of hostile policy moves by the government, with indications that enrolments may have fallen by more than a third from key countries, including Nigeria and India.

One senior university insider said that the sector as a whole had been spooked by data that showed the number of international students taking up places in January 2024 was way below the bottom end of projections for everyone. Data from Enroly, a web platform used by one in three international students for managing university enrolment, showed that deposit payments were down 37% compared with last year.