Category: International

  • It’s the Home Office that’s misselling UK higher education

    It’s the Home Office that’s misselling UK higher education

    On 23 May 2023, then home secretary Suella Braverman announced a package of measures to damp down the higher education sector’s contribution to net migration. The removal of the right for taught postgraduates to bring dependants dominated the headlines, and has loomed large over arguments about international recruitment ever since.

    One of the other changes that attracted less publicity – indeed, it was welcomed by the sector – was the elimination of international students’ ability to switch out of the student route onto a work visa before their studies have been completed (with the exception of PhD students, who would still be allowed to after 24 months, in recognition of the fact they may be employed by their university).

    This new policy was brought into effect by a statement of changes to the immigration rules on 17 July 2023. As set out by paragraphs 6.5 and 6.6 of the explanatory memorandum, the ban on “switching” came into effect at 3pm that same day, counter to usual practice of leaving at least 21 days before immigration rule changes apply. “The Government considers this departure from that convention to be necessary and proportionate,” it is noted, in order to “reduce the possibility of a large number of applications for […] switching being made in the 21 days usually available between Immigration Rules changes being laid and coming into force.”

    A petition opposing the change was launched, eventually gaining 15,579 signatures:

    We want Government to postpone the rule implemented on 17 July 2023 which prevents existing students from moving to a Skilled Worker without completing studies. We believe this rule should only be implemented on new students starting in January 2024.

    We believe this change is unfair and unjustified as when students came the rules allowed them to switch onto the Skilled Worker visa route without completing studies and existing students should not be prevented from switching in this way. The rule should be implemented to new students starting from January 2024.

    There should be no retrospective effect on law, it should be implemented on new students coming from January 2024 onwards.

    The Home Office was unmoved, saying in its response that “the student visa is for study” and that “we needed to crack down on broader abuse of the system and prevent people using the Student route as a backdoor to looking for work.”

    On the charge that this was a “retrospective” application of the law, the response said:

    When someone is switching immigration routes, the rules that apply are those in place at the time they switch, not the rules in place when they first entered the UK under a different route entirely.

    One student affected by the change was Ashraful Islam, from Bangladesh, who had come to the UK on a student visa in January 2023. On 20 July of that year – three days after the statement of changes – he applied to switch to a five-year skilled worker visa, with a plan to work in the care sector. He had a certificate of sponsorship from an employer dated 16 June.

    His application was rejected by the Home Office – and he applied for a judicial review. This was refused in both January and April 2024, so he went to the Court of Appeal. The case was rejected for a final time in April of this year.

    His case rested on a line in the new rules which said:

    An application which does not meet all the validity requirements for a Skilled Worker may be rejected as invalid and not considered.

    The argument was that the presence of may within the rules (“may be rejected”) left discretion to the Secretary of State to make a decision. He also pointed out that his certificate of sponsorship had been issued before the rule change, the rapid implementation of the new rule departed from convention, the application was made very shortly after the change came into force, he had not been aware of the change’s effect, and that he met all other criteria. Given these facts, were the Home Office empowered to exercise discretion there were a variety of reasons why it should choose to do so.

    The judges agreed that this was not a correct interpretation of what the word may was doing in this context – rather, the “natural and ordinary meaning” was that the Home Office is entitled to reject a non-compliant application “without any consideration whatever of the underlying merits of the application.”

    The court did however rule that the Home Office was not able to claim its legal costs from the appellant, as it had failed to submit an argument to the court until 17 March, two weeks before the hearing, despite permission to appeal having been granted in July 2024.

    Nobody cares

    The final tossing out of Ashraful Islam’s persistent attempts to get redress through the courts is probably the last glimmer of attention to a piece of immigration policy that nobody really cared about.

    You would get long odds on switching from student to work visas ever being allowed again in any future migration rules. In the run-up, Universities UK International spoke for most of the higher education sector when it said:

    We would welcome the proposals to end switching from student and work visas where students have not completed their course. This would close an unhelpful loophole and ensure that international students that choose the UK finish their programmes before they are able to move into full-time employment.

    Universities’ work was greatly complicated by international students who had seemingly applied solely in order to get to the UK and then immediately look for employment. There are a whole host of incentives to seek to prevent this from happening, from tuition fees being paid in instalments to UKVI compliance metrics penalising institutions with lower completion rates. And it somehow goes further than this, striking at a sense of what university study is for.

    It’s hardly good for students either, who are paying enormous amounts of upfront tuition fees, visa charges, and in many cases commission to recruitment agents, relative to the worth of the education they receive during a shortened time as a student in the UK.

    But you couldn’t quite imagine a world in which home students were legally prevented from dropping out of university and going into employment (though admittedly a regulatory focus on continuation along with a completely inflexible student finance system put plenty of pressure in the system to prevent this from happening). The government’s whole framing of international students in recent years has become dominated by a tension over whether or not they are supposed to be finding employment. Like this, not like that. And equally in the higher education sector, the change in tenor around an institution’s relationship with its international students that the reintroduction of post-study work permissions engendered has still not really played out in full.

    The corresponding rise in importance of international recruitment agents and sub-agents is a big part of this. The Financial Times’ splash last weekend on how students are being “lured” to the UK was a welcome bit of attention to the issue. One student had been told that they would be eligible for indefinite leave to remain after five years on the student and graduate route – neither qualifies. Another felt she had been misled over the availability and remuneration of part-time work. We’ve covered stories of much worse practice on Wonkhe in the past.

    Recruitment agents (and a wider ecosystem of peers, advisors and influencers) are undoubtedly encouraging and facilitating young people in other countries who would like to work in the UK to find ways to take advantage of student visas. One commentator is quoted over on University World News this week in pretty stark terms:

    One agent once told me that the student visa route, despite upfront tuition payments, was ‘cheaper and less risky than paying a people smuggler’.

    The Home Office’s approach to policymaking has become a whack-a-mole for these instances of unintended consequences – with the result that the majority who would actually like a fulfilling university experience followed by a successful professional life, whether in the UK or elsewhere, are constantly having their experiences made more tawdry and more unfair. And this is to say nothing of the fact that constantly changing how the visa system works creates a perfect state of flux, confusion and misinformation for unscrupulous actors to take advantage of.

    If it was just about switching, that would be one thing. But the changes to the post-study work landscape have proliferated in the last three years – and despite what the government may protest, it is one retrospective change after another if you are an international student.

    Now wait for last year

    From 6 February 2024 the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) main rate rose from £624 to £1,035 a year, a 66 per cent increase. This had at least been announced in July 2023 – with the rationale of funding an NHS pay rise – along with an increase to visa fees. The cost of a graduate visa, for example, rose by 15 per cent to £822.

    In neither case did we see quite the level of haste from the Home Office that had been the case with banning switching. But there is still a clear “retrospective” element to it, given that many students moving onto post-study work would have already signed up for their student visa before the changes had been made – in some cases, long before. It doesn’t really make any odds whether those on student visas are given a handful of hours, or 21 days, or several months – they are a captive audience.

    The increase in visa fees and health surcharge also applied to the skilled worker route (with the exception of certain healthcare occupations for the IHS) – again, those moving from study or graduate visas into work visas were charged far in excess of what they could have expected would be the case. For those with dependants, yet more. The IHS is an annual charge, but all years are payable in advance.

    If we consider an international student’s time at university and subsequent entry into the labour market as one “product”, then this would be a clear example of drip-pricing – showing the purchaser an initial price and then including additional, unavoidable charges later in the purchase process. Elsewhere on Wonkhe, Jim has written regularly about how universities themselves are required to avoid this in their marketing and contractual arrangements with students, especially under more stringent CMA guidance which is in effect as of this year.

    The counter-argument would then be that study and work are two separate things – going back to the Home Office response to the switching petition, it’s a “different route entirely” – as well as the fact that the government is not selling a product, it’s operating the country’s border system. But as the international education strategy and many other policy papers spell out, post-study work arrangements are designed to attract students to study in the UK, despite all the subsequent handwringing. They are part of the package. The Home Office might be safe from judicial review here, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

    The changes last year went far beyond price-gouging. From April the baseline minimum salary for skilled worker visas was increased from £26,200 to £38,700, and the minimum salary specific to particular jobs (the “going rate”) was also substantially increased. Student and graduate visa holders benefit from a discount rate here, but this was still a massive inflation-busting restriction on the jobs that students would be able to get sponsorship for. For many, this was a large part of the reason to come to the UK to study – to progress from university into a career, in the same way that it is for domestic students. For plenty, this was essentially the only reason they had chosen the UK higher education system over international rivals – let’s be honest.

    Again, for international students already at university in the UK, and a large swathe of graduate visa holders, the changes were implemented far too quickly for there to be any possibility of them getting onto skilled work routes before the cut-off (let’s remember, “switching” is banned, and morally suspect). James Cleverly’s statement to Parliament in December was clear this was not retrospectively unfair on those already here:

    Those already in the Skilled work route, and applications made before the rules change, will not be subject to the new £38,700 salary threshold when they change employment, extend, or settle.

    So that’s alright then. Unless you are a student, or a graduate route visa holder not yet in a position to find permanent long-term employment.

    The raised salary threshold was well in excess of the average salary for typical graduate roles in many parts of the UK. It’s unsurprising that both the Scottish and Welsh governments have been hammering the point that two years of graduate route (unsponsored) work is unlikely to allow young people to progress to a point in their careers where they are being paid enough to qualify for the skilled worker visa, given average wages in both nations. The same is true in many parts of England. If you wanted to design a policy to encourage graduates to head to London (and, longer-term, to start their educational journeys at random newly-opened branch campuses in the capital), it would probably look a lot like this.

    So now international students will be paying much more in immigration charges than they could have realistically expected upon coming to the UK to study. And the kinds of work available to them for longer-term settlement have completely changed, as has its geography. Could it get any worse?

    There’s no way this white paper’s CMA compliant

    The latest round of proposed changes to migration policy, as heralded in last Monday’s white paper, represent a new low in terms of changing the rules of the game while it’s already in motion.

    We don’t yet know when the reduction in length of the graduate route will come into effect (for UG and PGT) – next January feels most likely if you had to guess. The detail remains to be seen, but it feels wholly plausible that many students currently studying on courses which finish after this date will see themselves with a smaller post-study work entitlement than they expected when they signed up.

    But as much as this change and the prospect of a fee levy may have caught the sector’s attention – for their as-yet-unknown impact on recruitment and institutional finances – there are much more flagrant examples of rug-pulling in what the government’s proposing.

    Really it’s a cumulative effect. Labour’s overall plan to link up skills and migration is premised on a lot of additional charges and eligibility changes for work visas. For example, the Immigration Skills Charge which employers must pay when sponsoring a skilled worker visa is being hiked by 32 per cent to more than £1,300 a year (for medium and large employers). This (further) discourages companies from sponsoring anyone on the graduate route – ironically, students going directly to the skilled worker visa on completion of their course are exempt, further calling into question how the graduate route is being conceptualised.

    Visa thresholds for skilled work, already massively hiked in 2024, are likely to rise further in many professions that international graduates might have been planning to go into. The planned abolition of the immigration salary list, which provides salary discounts for certain occupations, will see to this – though we don’t know the detail yet. Many occupations will be removed from eligibility altogether. The Migration Advisory Committee has also just said that it would like to further review the “new entrant” discount rate for students (and presumably graduate visa holders):

    The impacts of arrangements for new entrants since the 2024 salary threshold increase are uncertain and would be worth reviewing in more detail.

    All these policy measures and the question marks hanging over them greatly complicate the ability of current students to plan where they are going – and represent a fundamental break with how the system was working when they signed up to study in the UK.

    Worst of all is the change to routes to citizenship and indefinite leave to remain – again, ill-defined and uncertain in its exact implementation for the moment. But the white paper promises that in the future it will take 10 years to qualify for settlement, rather than the current five. For one thing, indefinite leave to remain brings with it eligibility for home tuition fees – groups like Hong Kong Watch are already highlighting how this may mean young people on BN(O) visas needing to wait an extra five years to qualify. In England, at least – the Scottish government has already changed the rules to allow them to qualify after three years’ residency.

    And for all the young people from around the world who at some point in the last few years made the decision to plan for a long-term career in the UK? One graduate route visa holder greeted last Monday’s white paper announcements with the following post on social media:

    It’s official: UK graduate visas are a £3000 worth scam. To anyone who’s reading this and pondering about where to study out of the European countries: do not repeat my mistakes and waste your time, energy, and money on boosting the UK economy for nothing in return.

    £3000 is roughly the graduate visa fee plus two years of the immigration health surcharge. The particular policy change that had spurred the post was the change to long-term residency:

    I’m so mad at myself right now! I spent a huge amount of money and time on looking for a sponsored position in this country only to find out that I won’t be able to do it and that if I do land a sponsored role, it won’t mean my whole life isn’t in a precarious situation for 10 YEARS.

    They go onto say that they now regret having studied in the UK, and that they will now do their best to warn off other prospective students and graduates (as well as hoping to “magically land an incredibly high-paying job” in the window before further changes come into effect).

    And in the middle

    Plenty of international students will be confused right now – or furious. Most if not all international applicants will not be sure about exactly what they would be getting into if they came to the UK to study in the next year.

    Into the information void inevitably swoops networks of recruiters and advisors, many acting on slices of commission from higher education institutions, to over-promise and distort what post-study work in the UK is like – or at least to act as if they have the answers.

    Universities are stuck in the middle. Agents will still be keen to “lure” students to the UK, and in the worst parts of the industry this will continue to involve outright deception. And the government is once again making changes to post-study work that retrospectively affect students, in ways that would have affected their decision-making if they had known. There will be a generation of graduates going back to their home countries with cautionary tales of how international education is not how it was promised to them.

    This isn’t to say that the higher education sector is entirely divorced from both these acts of misselling. The behaviour of agents should be within the sector’s gift to improve, and some steps appear to be being taken, though without more transparency it’s hard to know to what extent it’s just talk. As for the Home Office, it would be nice if the impact of changes on current students would feature much more prominently in the sector’s lobbying efforts, as compared to hypothetical applicant numbers.

    But practically, the next few years look set to have continued moral challenges for universities around international students, not just financial ones. UKVI might be cracking the whip, but increased scrutiny of international students’ attendance and progress cannot be allowed to become an intrusive refrain echoing through their lives on campus. The graduate route has changed and could change further, and realistically will not be a route into permanent work in the UK for many – so universities need to think how their graduates can actually get something fulfilling out of it, and evaluate whether this is working.

    International students and applicants alike will need clear, honest advice about how the visa system works – from the university itself, rather than those with a financial stake in the ensuing decisions – as well as honesty when things are shit and honesty when what’s coming down the line is not clear.

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  • Plotting the impact of an international fee levy

    Plotting the impact of an international fee levy

    There’s not many in the higher education sector that would have welcomed any part of the recent immigration white paper.

    The reduction in the graduate route time limit would have been difficult enough. The BCA changes to duties on providers in order to sponsor international students will cause many problems. The possibility of financial penalties linked to asylum claims for those on student visas was as unexpected as it is problematic.

    But it is the levy that has really attracted the ire of UK higher education.

    The best form of defence

    On one level it is simply a tax – on the income from international student fees, which is one of a vanishingly few places from which universities can cross-subsidise loss-making activity like research and teaching UK-domiciled students.

    Yes, the funds raised are promised variously to “skills and higher education” or just “skills”, and the suggestion seems to be that the costs will be passed on entirely to international students via rises in tuition fees. There’s not any real information on the assumptions underpinning this position, or credible calculations by which the proportion of students that may be deterred by these rises and other measures has been estimated.

    But details are still scant – the government has, after all, only promised to “explore” the introduction of a levy – and used the idea of a six per cent levy on international tuition fees as an “illustrative example”. We have to look forward to the Autumn statement (not even the skills white paper – remember joined-up, mission-led, government?) for more – and do recall that the white paper is a consultation and responses need to be made in order to finesse the policy.

    Thinking about impact

    There’s no reliable way to assess the impact of this policy with so little information, but we do know a lot about the exposure of each university to the international market.

    For starters here’s a summary of provider income from overseas fees since 2016–17 – both for individual providers and (via the filters) for the sector as a whole.

    [Full screen]

    The story has been one of growth pretty much anywhere you care to look – with only limited evidence of a cooling off in the most recent year of data. Some institutions have trebled their income from this source over the eight years of available data, with particular growth in postgraduate taught provision.

    In considering the financial impact of a potential levy I have used the most recent (2023–24) year of financial data – showing the total non-UK fee income on the vertical axis and the proportion of total income represented by the value of the levy on the horizontal. By default I have modelled a levy of six per cent (you can use the filter to consider other levels).

    [Full screen]

    Who’s up, who’s down?

    In the majority of large universities the cost of levy is equivalent to around two per cent of total income. In the main it is the Russell Group that sees substantial income from international fees – the small number of exceptions (most notably the University of Hertfordshire and the University of the Arts London) would see a levy impact of closer to three per cent of total income.

    What we can’t realistically model is university pricing behavior and the impact on recruitment. Universities generally charge what the market will stand for international courses – and this value is generally higher for providers that are better known from popular league tables.

    Subject areas and qualifications also have an impact (the cost of an MBA, for example, may be higher than a taught creative arts masters – a year of postgraduate study may cost more than a year of an undergraduate course), as does the country from which students are arriving (China may be charged more than India, for example).

    Some better off universities in the middle of the market may choose to swallow more of the cost of the levy in order to increase their competitiveness for applicants making decisions on price – this would put pressure on the currently cheaper end of the market to follow suit as well as direct competitors, and may lower the overall floor price for particular providers (though, to be fair, private providers are still better positioned to undercut should they have access to funds from investment or other parts of the business).

    There is an obvious impact on the quality of the provision if providers do cut the amount of fee income – and this as well could have an impact on the attractiveness of the whole sector. For more hands-on courses in technical or creative subjects, provision may become unviable overall – surrendering the soft power of influence in these fields.

    A starting point

    It’s not often that we see a policy proposal on university funding launched with so little information. Generations of politicians have learned that university funding policy changes are the equivalent of poking a wasps nest with a sharp stick – it may be something that needs doing but the short term pain and noise is massive.

    It could be that it is a deliberate policy to let the sector (and associated commentariat) go crazy for a month or so while a plan is developed to avoid the less desirable (for ministers) consequences. But the idea that international students will gladly pay more to support an underfunded sector is one that has been at the heart of university activity for decades – the only real change here is that the government feels it can put some of the profits to better use than some of our larger and better-known providers.

    In all of this there appears to have been little consideration of the fairness of putting extra costs onto the fees of international students – particularly where they personally don’t see any value from their additional spend. But this has been an issue for a good few years, and it seems to have taken the possibility of a tariff (which could be considered unfair to cash-strapped universities too) to drive this problem further up the sector’s agenda.

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  • Everything in the immigration white paper for higher education

    Everything in the immigration white paper for higher education

    The Home Office immigration white paper – Restoring control over the immigration system – has arrived, and there are some seriously consequential decisions for international students and the higher education sector.

    The graduate route will be cut from two years (for undergraduates and master’s students) to 18 months. A range of new measures that will make visa sponsorship duties more onerous for higher education providers are coming into effect. There are steps to attract “top scientific talent.”

    And most unexpectedly of all, the idea of introducing a levy on international student tuition fees is floated, “to be reinvested into the higher education and skills system.”

    Mood music

    For all that there are some serious, significant changes to student and graduate visas contained within the white paper, the last few years of policy turmoil has demonstrated that much of the impact of migration policy on student recruitment is determined by how changes are interpreted by prospective students weighing up their choices between different destination countries.

    After having spent a couple of months in office making more positive noises about international students – and repeatedly patting themselves on the back about it – Labour has since plunged back into the murky waters of “talking tough on migration”, with students a political football yet again. How much this resonates abroad, and with what tenor the press in key recruiting countries reports on all of this, will probably have the greatest overall effect on what follows for the sector.

    But the white paper itself is pretty bullish on international students – more so than we might have expected. There’s plenty of language that would have not looked out of place in a Conservative policy document, had Rishi Sunak not scrambled for an election instead of providing a proper response to the MAC review. So the Home Office tells us:

    In recent years, we have seen an increase in students staying in the UK following their studies. Alongside this, we have also seen an increase in sponsored study visas for lower-ranking education institutions.

    And that:

    We have also seen a series of problems involving misuse and exploitation of student visas, where visas are used as an entry point for living and working in the UK without any intention to complete the course, and increasing numbers of asylum claims from students at the end of their course, even though nothing substantive has changed in their home country while they have been in the UK.

    Home secretary Yvette Cooper’s introduction even tries to paint the last government as recklessly pro-international recruitment (our bolding):

    Immigration policy during the last Parliament replaced free movement with a free-market experiment which incentivised employers to freely recruit from abroad rather than train at home, allowed education institutions to pursue unlimited expansion of overseas students without proper checks in place, and directly encouraged the NHS and care organisations to bring in far more staff from abroad while still cutting support or training places in the UK.

    The Office for National Statistics’ recent finding that more than half of students arriving in 2020 still held leave after three years gets an airing – a point which those in the sector who have repeatedly been arguing that the vast majority of international students return home after graduating would do well to heed.

    We’d also note that the white paper’s observation that growth in international recruitment has been particularly pronounced in those institutions further down the international rankings (made up as they are in the main of research output and spurious reputation surveys) is particularly inane, and yet another of those examples of the Home Office weighing in on education policy and the size and shape of the sector. It has its roots in the last government’s response to the MAC review, but it’s profoundly depressing to see it taken forward as a stick to beat teaching-intensive universities with.

    The graduate route

    The post-study work visa’s reduction in length will likely generate the most headlines, at home and abroad. Drawing on a new piece of evaluation conducted last spring, the Home Office concludes that:

    Too many graduates allowed to stay in the UK following the successful completion of their studies are not moving into the graduate level roles for which the Graduate visa route was created.

    A survey of just under 3,000 visa holders saw only 30 per cent report being in “professional” occupations, with others either not giving a straightforward answer to the question or (31 per cent) being in occupations whose entry requirements are likely to be A level equivalent or lower.

    The build-up to the white paper’s publication was accompanied by a somewhat ludicrous debate over whether the (non-sponsored) graduate visa would somehow be limited to graduate-level work or salary – regardless of the fact that this would have meant turning it into a completely different visa with a heavy overlap with the skilled worker route.

    Instead, the government has concluded that it should be reduced to 18 months – it appears that this applies only to undergraduate and master’s students, who currently are entitled to two years, rather than PhDs.

    It’s not really spelled out how this new length has been arrived at – the charitable interpretation would be that this is sufficient time to allow graduates who are going to find graduate-level work to indeed find it, while those who are either unable to or were never really serious about doing so (in the government’s eyes) will be obliged to leave sooner.

    This Home Office’s statement of the problem is that “the intention behind the Graduate route was to support the economy.” No mention is made of enhancing the UK’s attractiveness as a study destination, which was also a strategic objective at the route’s launch, and part of the international education strategy. The government no longer seems to want to have this conversation.

    The survey that (in parts) provides the evidence base for the curtailment of the route also notes that 65 per cent of users said that gaining work experience was one of the most important reasons to engage in post-study work. But – as we’ve observed before – this function of the graduate route gets increasingly ignored. The Home Office frames all graduate route holders as needing to acquire graduate-level roles, as quickly as possible, and then disapproves of the contribution to net migration that this begets.

    Diving a bit deeper into the graduate route evaluation that is, in theory, the justification for the changes, we again see the Home Office continuing to divide up the sector in terms of Russell Group and non-Russell Group, despite the fact that DfE under Labour has discontinued this practice in school performance management.

    The majority of Graduate route users graduated from a non-Russell Group university (72%), while a quarter (26%) graduated from a Russell Group university.

    While this finding doesn’t get a mention in the white paper itself, it’s of a piece with the pronouncements elsewhere that too many students seem to be coming through those less prestigious universities for the Home Office’s liking.

    So what’s the upshot? Yet again, the impact modelling deployed in government to assess the effects of visa changes on the higher education sector is pretty pathetic. A student route evaluation published alongside the white paper sees 66 per cent of survey respondents say they were aware of the Graduate route (this gets us down to n = 1,265). Of these, 73 per cent said it influenced their decision. Of these, 29 per cent said they would not have come if it wasn’t available. Blithely multiplying these percentages together leads to an assumption (in the white paper’s technical annex) that 14 per cent of applicants would be put off if the graduate route were abolished.

    Of course, the Home Office didn’t ask about reducing it by six months – it’s almost as if this decision was thrashed out in Whitehall horse-trading rather than a pragmatic example of policy implementation. As they are lopping a quarter of the graduate route, they have – genuinely – divided 14 per cent by four to get 3.5 per cent. This would equate to around 12,000 students a year if by some stroke of dumb luck the assumption turned out to be true. But what really comes across is that they have no idea.

    For international students who are not put off, the result of shortening the route will be either to reduce the amount of time they have to accrue valuable work experience or – for those who are hoping to build a career in the UK – accelerated pressure on the job hunt. Institutions will need to get even more serious about advice, careers support, and evaluation. This is especially the case given all the other wholesale changes to work visas that the white paper detonates – students will need support in navigating a system that each year is a little different to how it was when they started thinking about where to apply.

    Compliance

    In a lengthy section entitled “responsible recruitment”, the white paper sets out some serious reforms to how UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) will manage compliance among those higher education institutions sponsoring students. It’s argued that current thresholds are “too lenient” and “have left the route open to abuse and exploitation.”

    We saw promises to make compliance standards stricter in the last government’s response to the MAC review, so there is a sense that some of what’s proposed in the white paper has been held back over the autumn to be made public here. UKVI has already been subjecting certain institutions to enhanced scrutiny for the last few months – but what’s proposed here goes quite substantially beyond that, and could be extremely challenging for some (especially small) institutions.

    The current metrics used to determine whether a sponsoring higher education provider is fulfilling its duties are – via the annual basic compliance assessment, or BCA – having a visa refusal rate of less than 10 per cent, a course enrolment rate of at least 90 per cent, and a course completion rate of at least 85 per cent.

    The white paper reveals that all of these measures will be made five percentage points stricter. To get an indication of how substantive such changes would be, it is noted that:

    Data from the 2023–24 BCA suggests that 22 HEIs would not have met at least one of the tightened criteria set out in this paper. These institutions sponsored approximately 49,000 students while refusing 400 during their 12-month assessment period.

    The technical annex also assumes that, of these 22, five would not be able to become compliant and therefore lose sponsorship rights, for at least a year. It puts the impact at between 9,000 and 14,000 fewer student visa grants, given that some students will be squeezed out of the system, whereas other genuine applicants will find alternative study destinations. It’s very much a guesstimate though – but the vastly increased requirements will put enormous pressure on higher education institutions to play it extremely safe with recruitment and agent partnerships, and to subject applicants to even more rigorous checks.

    There’s more as well – UKVI will roll out new interventions for sponsors “close to failing metrics”, sign-up to the Agent Quality Framework will be mandated – a measure that has been proposed about a hundred times by this point, and the framework is already widely subscribed to – and a new RAG rating will be used to rate each sponsoring institution’s compliance. On this latter point, it’s mentioned that this will help the public assess institutions’ compliance, raising the intriguing possibility that we are about to get a lot more transparency from UKVI than was ever the case. And massively ramping up the pressure on universities (and, especially, smaller providers) to avoid falling foul of the rules.

    It’s also worth not losing sight of the impact on international students themselves of all this bearing down on compliance – a measurably more bureaucratic study experience and, if not well implemented by providers, one that reinforces a sense of unwelcomeness as they are repeatedly asked to jump through hoops that home students do not face.

    But probably the most important measure contained within the proposals – and, if implemented properly, an extremely welcome one – is obliging a provider who wants to request a larger CAS allocation to “demonstrate that they are considering local impacts when taking its decision on international recruitment.” There’s no further information on what this would look like, but housing must clearly be front and centre of the government’s thinking here – it’s something Yvette Cooper has mentioned on a number of occasions.

    Asylum claims

    In the run-up to the white paper’s publication, leaks to the press made it clear that one area where international higher education was in the Home Office’s crosshairs was over the proportion of asylum claims generated by those who had arrived in the UK on student visas – as we’ve recently written about on Wonkhe, this hit 16,000 in 2024, almost 15 per cent of all claims in the year.

    The white paper says that this number has been increasing “at pace”, and also reveals that the majority of the students claiming asylum “do so as they approach their visa expiry date” – a fact which is ascribed to students making claims to stay in the UK, rather than due to changes in their own country.

    It had been briefed to the media that applications for work and study visas by those deemed most likely to overstay and claim asylum would face higher rejection rates, through some of “pattern spotting” – a predictive measure that would inevitably face legal challenges, it should be noted. The white paper doesn’t, in fact, get too much into the detail here, rather setting out towards the end a “series of further measures” that will be explored.

    One of these seems likely to be the use of international students’ proof of funds as evidence that they should not be eligible for asylum. We also get reference to potential “financial measures, penalties and sanctions” for sponsoring institutions – which would include universities. Detail on all this is going to come at a later point.

    An international student levy?

    When the Australian government commissioned a wholesale review of higher education – the Accord – one of the ideas that generated most pushback from the sector was for a levy on international students. It came out of the Accord commission’s interim report – then education minister Jason Clare said it was analogous to a “sovereign wealth fund” for the sector, and could be spent on infrastructure or research.

    Australia’s research-intensives – the Group of Eight – called it a “damaging international student tax”. It was absent from the Accord’s final recommendations, replaced by a “futures fund” with joint contributions from universities and government. It still wasn’t popular and, like much of the Accord’s long-term thinking, there hasn’t been any sign of policymakers picking it up.

    And yet – completely out of the blue, something similar has cropped up in today’s white paper:

    The Government will explore introducing a levy on higher education provider income from international students, to be reinvested into the higher education and skills system. Further details will be set out in the Autumn Budget.

    The Home Office wants to stress that this is not a final policy position – indeed, it is not something that one government department could move forward with on its own. The technical annex gives the “illustrative” example of a six per cent levy on tuition (and also notes that it would likely be passed on to students in higher fees).

    A six per cent levy would generate something in the order of £570m, if we generously take into account the reductions in recruitment that the Home Office has modelled (the levy’s putative effects are transmogrified into assumptions about changes to student demand based on some work from London Economics that was only focused on students from the EU, but it’s not even worth getting into that).

    There’s no way to reliably say which universities would lose out in terms of paying the levy – the government appears to be assuming that the students that won’t now come are the ones that they don’t want to come, which would likely hit less prestigious providers with more international students. You might imagine that some part of the levy would have to be used to prop up otherwise struggling providers in deprived areas – as we would otherwise lose them.

    What that would amount to is a word we’ve not heard from any government for a good few years – redistribution. Though the idea of the sector as a single set of accounts is familiar among headline writers and UCU campaigners, in practice there’s been little deviation from the idea that the market is the fairest means to distribute resources (“the funding follows the student”) with the exception of a very small amount of funds for “world class” small and specialist providers.

    Of course, by mentioning that the levy would be spent on “higher education and skills” opens the door to the money going elsewhere in the tertiary space. And, as with the apprenticeship levy, there’s no guarantee that the funds would not be top-sliced by the Treasury. There is absolutely no doubt that such a system, in the event that it came to pass, would be the subject of policy instability for many subsequent years, with everyone and their dog coming up with tweaks, fiddles and overhauls in how it should best be deployed.

    We’ve noted that the Home Office vaguely intimates that the cost of the levy would be borne by students (via increased fees) rather than by higher education providers. This may well not be the case. The last decade has shown that providers will set the fees at the level where they think they can recruit, rather than with reference to cost of provision (or home fees). If fees could comfortably go up six per cent, then they already would have. So expect a serious lobbying effort from universities against any further plans to introduce this levy.

    There are also substantial issues around devolution here. International student fees are really not there for the Home Office to grab and claim that they are a reserved matter, in the way that visas are. Presumably what’s being considered here would apply England-only – unless the devolved governments suddenly think this is worth going along with.

    All the other stuff

    Given that higher education is so intimately interconnected with both the visa system and the labour market, there’s barely a page of the white paper that doesn’t have some degree of consequence for the sector. Here’s a rundown.

    Global talent: the one area where there is a commitment to increasing migration is “very high talent routes.” There is talk of simplifying the use of the global talent visa to recruit top scientific talent, as well as possibly doubling the number of overseas universities whose graduates qualify for the high potential individual work visa route. Eligibility here is based on international university rankings, and consequently is a complete mess.

    Student dependants: there will be a new English language requirement for all adult dependants, at A1 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). It’s also noted that the intention is to increase this over time.

    Short-term study visas: the government has already increased scrutiny of these visas for students coming on short (six to eleven month) English language courses, but there will also be a review of accreditation bodies, due to a very high refusal rate.

    Immigration skills charge: This charge for companies sponsoring those on skilled worker visas (currently £1,000 a year for medium or large sponsors) will be increased by 32 per cent. It’s one of those things that sounds good on paper – reinvesting visa fees into the skills system – but has never been implemented properly, with money just vanishing into the Treasury. In theory, that’s now going to change, with the spending review to announce “skills funding for priority sectors” paid for out of these funds.

    We should also note that higher education institutions are currently exempt from paying this charge for many categories of scientist, research managers and teaching professionals – so worth keeping an eye on the detail of the changes here when they do appear.

    The Labour Market Evidence Group: this body, which had previously been referred to as “the quad”, is to be made up of the industrial strategy advisory council, the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), Skills England (and the devolved nations’ skills bodies, to the extent the government will properly involve them rather than dumping policy on them), and the DWP. We don’t learn much that wasn’t in the MAC’s annual report, but this group’s evidence will be used to inform workforce strategies for sectors that have high levels of overseas recruitment.

    The Immigration Salary List: this set of occupations eligible for discounts on skilled worker visa salary premiums is to be abolished. This was until recently known as the shortage occupation list, to give you a sense of how much churn successive governments have instituted in migration policy. Instead, the MAC is going to conduct a review of how discounts are used, with the result that the exact salary requirements for different jobs – which universities may want to recruit onto, or international graduates might want to progress to – are up in the air again. Currently those on student or graduate visas are entitled to a discount in the required salary for sponsorship.

    International education strategy refresh: Nope, no mention of this. The last we heard this was due for “early spring”, and presumably now the white paper has landed the DfE and the business department have a freer hand to get it launched.

    It’s hard to see how some of the original IES targets around diversification can persist, given the increased pressure on compliance (stay out of “risky” markets), potential plans to profile certain nationalities, and the fearmongering about students attending less prestigious institutions. A student number target feels a million miles away from how Labour is trying to position itself politically. And education export objectives, without any detail on what aspects on international activity the government is OK with increasing, are pretty meaningless. So what’s left to be in it?

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  • Higher education can cut through the immigration debate with a focus on quality

    Higher education can cut through the immigration debate with a focus on quality

    The surge for Reform in the recent local elections in England has increased fears in the higher education sector that Labour may feel compelled to focus on driving down immigration at the expense of its other priorities and missions – James Coe has set out the risks of this approach on Wonkhe.

    Vice chancellors are understandably frustrated with the public debate on immigration and do not relish the prospect of rehearsing the same political cycle in the wake of the forthcoming white paper on legal migration. All can reel off data point after data point demonstrating the value of international student recruitment to their regions and communities, which according to the most recent London Economics calculations for the academic year 2022–23 brought £41.9bn a year in economic returns to the UK. That data is well supported by polling that suggests the public is generally pretty unfussed about international students compared to other forms of legal migration. The latest insight from British Future on the public’s attitudes to international students found:

    International students are seen to boost the UK economy, fill skills gaps, improve local economies and create job opportunities for locals and make cities and towns more vibrant and culturally diverse.

    Heads of institution also add that of all the many and varied problems and complaints that arise from engagement with their local communities and regions, international students have never once featured. The problem, they say, is not policy, it is politics. And when politics tilts towards finding any means to drive down overall migration, higher education inevitably finds itself in the position of being collateral damage, despite the economic and reputational harm done – because it’s much easier to reduce student numbers than to tackle some of the more complex and intransigent issues with immigration.

    Standing the heat

    To give the government its due, the signal it wants to send on student visas is not currently about eroding the UK’s international competitiveness as a destination for study, and much more about reducing the use of that system for purposes for which it was never designed, particularly as a route to claiming asylum. Measures proposed are likely to include additional scrutiny of those entering from Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, an approach that may sit uncomfortably as making broad assumptions about a whole cohort of applicants, but at least has the benefit of being risk-based. That nuance may be lost, however, in how the public conversation plays out both within the UK and in the countries where prospective international students and their governments and media pay close attention to the UK international policy landscape and associated mood music.

    The political challenge is not limited to higher education. Recognising the derailing effect of constant short-term reactive announcements in immigration policy, a number of influential think tanks including the Institute for Government, the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Centre for Policy Studies, Onward, and British Future have called on the government to create an annual migration plan. The Institute for Government’s explanation of how it envisages an annual migration plan would work sets out benefits including clarity on overall objectives for the system with the ability to plan ahead, the segmentation of analysis and objectives by route, and the integration of wider government agendas such as those on skills, or foreign policy.

    For the higher education sector, an annual planning approach could make a big difference, creating space for differentiated objectives, policy measures and monitoring of student and graduate visas – something that in many ways would be much more meaningful than removing student numbers from overall published net migration figures, or presenting them separately. It could open up a sensible discussion about what data represents a meaningful measure, what should be adopted as a target and what should be monitored. It could also open up space for a more productive conversation between higher education representatives and policymakers focused on making the most of the connections between international education, regional and national skills needs, and workforce planning.

    In the weeks and months ahead the government is also expected to publish a refreshed international education strategy, which should give the sector a strong steer about what the government wants to see from international higher education. But it will be critical for that strategy to have a clear line of sight to other government priorities on both the economy and the wider immigration picture, to prevent it being siloed and becoming dispensable.

    The fate of the last government’s international education strategy tells an instructive tale about what happens when government is not joined up in its agenda. Three years ago the sector and its champions in Westminster celebrated the achievement of a core objective of that strategy – attracting 600,000 students to the UK – eight years earlier than planned. But that rapid growth provided both unsustainable, as numbers dropped again in response to external shocks, and politically problematic, as students bringing dependents drove up overall numbers and the government responded with another shift in policy. The credibility and longevity of the refreshed strategy will depend on the government’s willingness to back it when the political heat is turned up in other parts of the immigration system.

    Quality is our watchword

    The higher education sector is justifiably proud of its international offer and keen to work with government on developing a shared plan to make the most of opportunities afforded by bringing students to the UK to study. The focus has to be on quality: attracting well-qualified and capable applicants; offering high-quality courses focused on developing career-relevant skills, particularly where there is strategic alignment with the government’s industrial strategy; and further enhancing the global employability of UK international graduates, whether it’s through securing a good job via the Graduate route, or elsewhere.

    The value of international recruitment is not always very tangible to people living in communities in terms of valuable skills and cultural capital – and that breaks down to telling stories in ways that people can connect with. As one Labour Member of Parliament suggested to us, many parts of Britain are in the process of reimagining their collective identities, and part of the job is building a compelling identity connection with the new economy rather than harkening back to an imagined past. That is work that sits somewhat apart from simply explaining the value of international students, but may also turn out to be intimately connected to it.

    Higher education institutions can work with employers, the regional and national policymakers concerned with skills, innovation and growth, and in local communities, to further that agenda, but they need the breathing space afforded by policy stability and a clear plan from government they can trust will be sustainable. To create that space, the sector will need to demonstrate that it has a high standard of practice and will not tolerate abuse of the system. “Abuse” is a loaded word; many of the practices that raise alarm are technically legal, but they put the system as a whole in jeopardy. The sector has a great track record on developing a shared standard of practice through instruments like the Agent Quality Framework, but it may also need to collectively think through whose job it is to call out those who fall short of those standards, to avoid the whole sector being tarred with the brush of irresponsible practice.

    While the landscape is complicated and at times disheartening, UK higher education can cut through the noise by sticking like glue to its quality message. Many universities are bigger and longer standing than Premier League football clubs – but those bastions of community pride have also had to work through challenges with their places and update their practice as the landscape has shifted. There is an opportunity with the forthcoming white paper and international education strategy to get the government and the sector on the same side when it comes to international higher education. Both parties will need to show willing to hear where the other is coming from to avoid another five years of frustration.

    This article is published in association with IDP Education. It draws on a private discussion held with policymakers and heads of institution on the theme of international higher education’s contribution to regional economic growth. The authors would like to thank all those who took part in that discussion.

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  • Labour is learning the wrong lessons from Reform on immigration

    Labour is learning the wrong lessons from Reform on immigration

    The working classes are an easy foil for the dreams of conservative politicians. They are the salt of the earth, proper people who do real stuff, unlike the woke metropolitan elite who sit around and think things but are removed from the real world.

    As Joel Budd points out in his new book Underdogs The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, they are to the conservative imagination “sensible truth-tellers and bulwarks against left-wing nonsense.” Even more so they are the consensus position on immigration “The mass immigration that the elite has tolerated is crushing their wages, burdening the public services they rely on and filling their neighbourhood with strangers.” As Budd also points out this, well, isn’t true. In 2024 they voted for Starmer’s Labour Party who campaigned on public finances, NHS, and inflation.

    New Labour old problems

    It is with this in mind that Labour’s response to Reform’s election performance is as wrong as it is entirely predictable. Its wrongness could have significant consequences for universities.

    Let’s start with the big results. In May’s local elections in England Reform gained 677 councillors,ten councils, two mayors, and an MP. The votes are spread across the country but as John Curtice points out for the BBC there is an education faultline.

    Reform did best in places that most overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. University graduates overwhelmingly did not vote for Brexit. Reform received less than 20 per cent of the vote in wards where more than two in five people have a degree compared to 43 per cent in wards where over half of adults have few qualifications. As Curtice states

    In summary, Reform did best in what has sometimes been characterised in the wake of the Brexit referendum as ‘left-behind’ Britain – places that have profited less from globalisation and university expansion and where a more conservative outlook on immigration is more common.

    The policy solution alighted on by outriders in the Labour Party has so far been to say that Reform has done well therefore Labour should do things that appeal to the kind of people that vote for Reform. Or, at least, the kind of things Labour assumes appeal to the people that vote for Reform. And one of the key assumptions is that getting immigration down, whoever those immigrants might be, including students, is necessary for their electoral survival.

    Blue Labour redux

    University of Oxford graduate, and Blue Labour standard bearer, Jonathan Hinder MP has said he would not be “that disappointed” if universities went bust because of reducing international student immigration. Presumably he does not mean his own alma mater. Jo White, of the Red Wall Caucus, has urged Labour to “take a leaf out of President Trump’s book” when it comes to immigration. The end of the Labour Party which purports to be closer to its working class roots is moving rapidly and decisively against immigration. Tightening restrictions on graduates, and by extension making the UK a less attractive place to study, has been reported as an idea winning favour at the Home Office.

    The issue with the general public is that it is complicated. On its own, reducing student immigration will not win Labour a single vote in Runcorn in Helsby where Reform most recently won an MP. For a start Runcorn does not have a university so it will certainly not address immigration issues brought up during the election. Runcorn does however have several organisations that benefit from a vibrant university sector. SME net-zero collaboration with Lancaster. INEOS which benefits from the proximity of a university workforce and industrial collaborations. And Riverside College, amongst other examples, as a franchise partner of the University of Staffordshire.

    It is also worth making entirely clear that people in Runcorn also go to university. It’s a particular fault of both an understanding of class and an understanding of universities that this conflation is often made.

    Immigration, immigration, immigration

    If reducing student immigration will not make a material difference perhaps it will signal a vibes shift that will bring places like Runcorn on side. Again, here is where the working class will let you down. Analysis of the British Election Study collated by Joel Budd demonstrates that “Young white working-class people are not as liberal as young white middle-class people. But when it comes to immigration and race, they resemble them more closely than they resemble old white working-class people.” Again, there is just not a long term winning strategy in discouraging student and graduate migration.

    For universities this might be comforting but it isn’t the point.

    The extent to which anyone is willing to defend student immigration is the question of the extent to which they are willing to defend the value of universities. The value of universities is felt in exports and jobs but it is most directly felt on the extent to which the effects of a university make a place feel better. The thing that Boris Johnson, or at least his advisors, understood that higher education consistently has not is that people see politics through their places. Crime. Clean high streets. Local shops. Good jobs. Green spaces. Feeling safe to go out at night. And the myriad of tangible things that make up a place.

    In policy terms the absolute antithesis of levelling up are reforms which will depress international student numbers. The last thing Runcorn needs is a poorer Liverpool and weaker universities. The challenge for universities is to tilt the scale toward being popular not just being valuable. So popular as to make decisions on cutting student immigration culturally and electorally harder not just economically wrongheaded.

    The question then is how can universities do things in places that feel like they are doing good as well as actually doing good.

    A day like today is not for soundbites

    A key question is how infrastructure can be use toward a broad and good civic end. For example, of all of the things that the University of Liverpool did during Covid (of which there were many I have direct experience of, having worked there), the one that looms largest in my memory is when it gave up its car parks for NHS staff. Not the vaccines it helped develop or the PPE it manufactured but a low cost, high kindness gesture that resonated with people at the time. The other part of this is how largely universities loom in local communities. The extent to which their infrastructure, offices, shops, cafes, and other buildings and amenities are dispersed across the towns, cities, and localities so their presence has a resonance with the lives of people from day to day. People will often be aware of a university where it precedes the word hospital. There are opportunities for other collaborative infrastructures.

    Universities tend to be pretty good at turning their research into lectures, experiments, and days out for young people in an education setting. They are less good at making their research experiential for adults. Light Years by the University of Durham (full disclosure: I volunteer in supporting this work) has taken research to places people actually gather, places of worship, highstreets, and places of local interest across Durham county, as opposed to just the city.

    And it’s harder to articulate or even work out, but the extent to which local people feel universities are on their side matters. The cultural closeness universities build to their populations is not always about what they do but whether local people feeling it’s “their” or “the” university. There is no magic bullet for this beyond the slow grind of knowing a local place and acting with it.

    The political vibes risk overtaking a political reality. The key to Labour winning back its voters is to make tangible differences in the places they live. The economic headroom for them to do that runs through higher education institutions and their success. The permission to do so depends on people feeling like universities are a thing worth saving even with difficult political trades offs.

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  • The UK can seize the opportunity from US academia’s brain drain

    The UK can seize the opportunity from US academia’s brain drain

    The American higher education system, long admired as a global bastion of innovation, faces an existential threat. Since early 2025, sweeping federal funding cuts and politically motivated restrictions have destabilised universities, echoing the mid-twentieth century flight of European scientists to the USA – but with the roles reversed.

    This time, the UK has a chance to emerge as a refuge for displaced talent. To do so, it must act decisively, blending strategic policy with moral clarity.

    Academia unravelled

    Federal grants have historically fuelled breakthroughs in US universities, from cancer therapies to artificial intelligence. However, recent policies have transformed funding into a tool of ideological control. Take Columbia University, which lost $400 million in federal contracts after refusing to dismantle its diversity initiatives. Or Dr Naomi Lee, a public health researcher in Arizona, whose decade-long NIH-funded programme linking indigenous students to STEM careers was abruptly defunded. “They told us our work ‘promoted division,’” she says. “But our data showed it was bridging gaps.”

    The consequences ripple beyond individual projects. At Johns Hopkins, layoffs have gutted labs studying pediatric vaccines. Graduate students at Southern Illinois University, already grappling with shrinking state support, now face indefinite pauses on dissertations reliant on federal grants. “I’ve seen colleagues pack up microscopes and hard drives,” says Dr Raj Patel, a materials scientist at SIU. “They’re not just leaving institutions – they’re leaving the country.”

    This climate of fear mirrors Europe’s 1930s, when scholars fled fascism for American shores. Albert Einstein, denied a professorship in Nazi Germany, reshaped US physics. Enrico Fermi’s reactor experiments at the University of Chicago laid groundwork for the atomic age. Today, the US risks squandering this legacy – and the UK can learn from history.

    Post-war America’s scientific dominance wasn’t accidental. Programmes like the Rockefeller Foundation’s refugee fellowships lured talent with visas, funding, and academic freedom. Similarly, the UK’s response must be proactive. Canada’s “Tech Talent Strategy,” which fast-tracked visas for 3,000 displaced US researchers in 2025, offers a blueprint. But Britain’s advantages – language, elite universities, and shared research traditions – could yield even greater rewards.

    Here’s how

    Simplify pathways for displaced scholars: the UK’s Global Talent Visa, while robust, remains underutilised. Streamlining applications for researchers in contested fields – climate science, EDI, public health – would signal openness. Pair this with grants to offset relocation costs, as Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation does.

    Forge strategic institutional partnerships: UK higher education institutions should leverage ties with US peers under duress. Imagine Cambridge and Columbia co-funding a “satellite lab” in Cambridge for researchers fleeing US restrictions. During the Cold War, the CERN particle accelerator thrived through multinational collaboration.

    Target gaps in the US research landscape: The Trump administration’s aversion to “politicised” fields has left vacuums. The NIH’s 2025 freeze on gender-affirming care research stalled dozens of clinical trials. By prioritising such areas, UK funders could attract top talent while addressing unmet needs.

    Mobilise private and philanthropic support: A modern “research sanctuary fund” could operate on this principle – pooling resources from philanthropic organisations, ethical investors, and forward-thinking corporations to create a safety net for displaced researchers. Unlike traditional grants tied to narrow deliverables, this fund might prioritise intellectual freedom, offering multi-year support for teams whose work has been deemed “controversial” or politically inconvenient elsewhere.

    The power of such a fund lies in its ability to align diverse interests. Corporate partners, for instance, could gain early access to breakthroughs in exchange for underwriting lab costs, while higher education institutions might leverage these partnerships to expand their global research networks. To attract talent, the fund could experiment with hybrid models – pairing academic stipends with industry fellowships, or offering “innovation visas” that fast-track relocation for researchers whose expertise fills critical gaps in national priorities like AI ethics or climate resilience.

    Speed would be essential. When a government abruptly withdraws funding, researchers don’t have years to navigate bureaucracy. A streamlined application process – perhaps involving peer endorsements rather than exhaustive proposal requirements – could allow decisions within weeks, not months. The goal? To position the UK as the default destination for thinkers seeking stability, not just survival.

    Critics might argue this approach risks politicising philanthropy. But that’s precisely the point. In an era where knowledge itself is increasingly weaponised, protecting open inquiry becomes a radical act. By framing the fund as a defence of academic sovereignty, backers could transcend traditional charity narratives, appealing to those who view intellectual migration not as a crisis to manage but a talent pipeline to cultivate.

    Navigating challenges

    Any ambitions for the UK to become a global hub for displaced academic talent face undeniable obstacles. Lingering funding shortfalls following Brexit, coupled with persistent political resistance to immigration, threaten to undermine even the most well-intentioned initiatives. The bureaucratic realities – such as visa processing times stretching to six months – create additional friction at precisely the moment when speed and flexibility are most critical.

    Yet these challenges only underscore the urgency of action. The competition for top-tier researchers has never been more intense. Countries like Canada and Germany have already streamlined their immigration systems to capitalize on the shifting academic landscape, offering faster visa approvals and more generous relocation packages. Every day of delay risks ceding ground to these rivals, eroding the UK’s long-term position as a leader in research and innovation.

    The choice is stark: adapt quickly or accept a diminished role in shaping the future of global scholarship. Addressing these hurdles will require more than piecemeal solutions – it demands a fundamental rethinking of how the UK attracts and retains intellectual talent. This means not only expediting visa processes but also confronting deeper questions about funding priorities and public narratives around immigration. The alternative – watching as the world’s best minds bypass Britain for more welcoming shores – would represent a historic missed opportunity.

    A question of values

    This isn’t merely about poaching talent. It’s about safeguarding the ethos of academia – curiosity, collaboration, dissent – at a time when the US is retreating from these principles. When the University of Frankfurt dismissed Einstein in 1933, he didn’t just bring equations to Princeton; he brought a belief that science should transcend borders and ideologies.

    The UK now faces a similar crossroads. By opening its doors, it can honour the spirit of figures like Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work in London (though overlooked in her lifetime) underpinned DNA discovery. It can also modernise its economy: a 2024 Royal Society study found that every pound invested in migrant researchers yields four pounds in patents and spin-offs.

    History rarely offers second chances. The UK has an extraordinary, fleeting opportunity to redefine itself as a global hub for free inquiry – one that could echo America’s post-war ascent. This requires more than visas and funding; it demands a public commitment to academia as a force for progress, not a political pawn.

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  • Inclusivity beyond the buzzwords | Wonkhe

    Inclusivity beyond the buzzwords | Wonkhe

    Universities highlight language support programs as proof of their commitment to inclusivity, yet these offerings are often expensive, overly prescriptive, optional, and poorly integrated.

    Pre-sessional provision comes with hefty price tags, making language support a privilege rather than a right. Students who cannot afford them are either excluded from higher education or forced to struggle in degree programs where linguistic preparedness is assumed rather than supported.

    I once supported a postgraduate student from East Asia who was excelling in her subject knowledge but consistently received vague feedback like “lack of critical engagement” on her assignments.

    She was deeply confused – she had addressed all the questions and provided detailed analysis. In our one-to-one tutorials, it became clear that the issue was not her understanding of the topic, but that she hadn’t been explicitly taught what criticality looks like linguistically in UK academic culture.

    No one had ever shown her how to signal argument structure or contrast ideas subtly in writing. Despite her intelligence and effort, she was left to decode these expectations on her own, and it affected both her grades and her confidence.

    What does it say about our commitment to inclusion when students are expected to navigate invisible academic norms alone?

    Supplementary or fundamental?

    To make matters worse, in-sessional provision, where available, is often treated as an afterthought rather than an integrated resource, leaving students struggling to meet academic demands or seeking help on their own time while managing intensive timetables, packed with lectures, assignments, and deadlines.

    This approach positions language support as a supplementary service rather than a fundamental component of academic success, reinforcing the notion that multilingual students must “catch up” instead of valuing their linguistic abilities as assets.

    In one programme I supported, attendance at in-sessional sessions was minimal at first – not because students didn’t need them, but because they didn’t know they existed. There was limited to zero visibility of these educational initiatives, and many students were unaware of how language development related to academic success.

    It wasn’t until we launched a more systematic approach to promotion – class presentations, VLE announcements, email campaigns, ads on campus screens, fliers, and peer recommendations – that attendance noticeably increased. Word of mouth became our most effective tool, which was both encouraging and telling. If in-sessional provision only gains traction through backdoor advocacy, how inclusive is that, really?

    Shortcomings, however, appear to extend far beyond language provision. Pedagogical practices in many institutions remain stubbornly monolingual, built on the assumption that a single teaching model can work for all students, regardless of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

    This one-size-fits-all approach, which assumes uniformity in learning needs and styles, disregards the diverse ways students engage with knowledge. Standardised teaching methods leave little room for flexibility, forcing students to conform rather than allowing for adaptability and meaningful engagement.

    Conformity or critical thinking?

    Nowhere is this more evident than in assessment. Universities continue to rely on rigid, English-centric evaluation methods including essays, presentations, and exams graded against standardised linguistic norms, disadvantaging multilingual students rather than valuing their perspectives.

    If inclusivity truly mattered, assessments would prioritise critical thinking, originality, and academic engagement over strict linguistic conformity. Instead, institutions uphold traditional models that often disadvantage students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. For example, I once co-marked a brilliant essay that presented a nuanced critique of policy frameworks. It was downgraded – not for weak argumentation – but for not aligning with “expected” academic language norms.

    Despite offering original insights and drawing on a range of interdisciplinary sources, the essay was penalised for its occasional non-standard syntax and limited use of discipline-specific vocabulary. Rather than recognising the intellectual rigour of the argument, the feedback focused almost exclusively on surface-level language issues. How does that reflect the critical thinking we claim to value?

    While universities struggle to create truly inclusive academic environments, the burden of making the system work falls on EAP practitioners and frontline educators, who are expected to foster inclusivity despite being overstretched, underpaid, and under-resourced. Many receive either little or no formal training in multilingual pedagogies, yet they are tasked with ensuring student success within a rigid system that resists adaptation. From personal experience, I can say that navigating this contradiction is emotionally and professionally draining.

    I’ve sat in staff meetings where the pressing need to be inclusive was discussed, only to return to classrooms with no budget for updated materials, no time allocation to work on such updates, and no training on how to implement the very principles being endorsed.

    At times, I’ve been expected to “embed inclusive practice” without any clear guidance on what that actually means in context, leaving me to interpret and apply vague directives on my own. This disconnect creates a sense of frustration and helplessness – wanting to support students meaningfully but lacking the structural backing to do so effectively.

    The disconnect is glaring – universities promote inclusivity in their policies while shifting the responsibility of implementation onto educators who lack the necessary resources, training, and structural support to make meaningful change. Institutions seek improvement without providing the means to achieve it.

    On top of this, accreditation bodies, which should act as enforcers of inclusivity, are complicit in this shortcoming. While they promote the idea of inclusivity as a core value, their competency frameworks remain vague and unenforceable, allowing institutions to check superficial boxes rather than implement meaningful change – without ever being truly held accountable.

    Instead of pushing institutions toward equitable assessment strategies, embedded language support, and multilingual pedagogies, accreditation bodies enable them to maintain the status quo while advertising themselves as champions of inclusion.

    Integrating EAP

    If universities and accrediting bodies are serious about inclusivity, they must dismantle their one-size-fits-all approach and invest in flexible, student-centered models. EAP should not be an expensive privilege but an embedded, fully integrated component of degree programs.

    Language support must be available without financial barriers and tailored to students’ actual needs rather than forced into a standardised mold that ignores their diverse experiences. Institutions must move beyond the outdated view that multilingualism is a problem to be fixed and instead embrace it as an academic strength that enhances learning for all students.

    For example, multilingual writing workshops, co-delivered by faculty and language specialists, have shown success in small-scale pilots. Why not scale them? Similarly, peer mentoring across language backgrounds fosters both inclusion and academic development. These are not costly solutions, but they do require intention and planning.

    Assessment practices must undergo reform. Universities should move beyond evaluating students solely through rigid linguistic norms and instead adopt translingual, context-sensitive assessments that measure intellectual engagement, not just English proficiency.

    Traditional assessment models often privilege students who are already proficient in standardised academic English, disregarding the depth of thought, creativity, and critical analysis that can be expressed through diverse linguistic resources.

    If higher education truly values critical thinking and originality, its assessment models must reflect that rather than simply rewarding those who conform to narrow linguistic standards. Practical steps might include offering multilingual glossaries during assessments, encouraging multimodal submissions (like presentations or podcasts), and designing rubrics that focus on analytical rigour rather than grammatical precision. These shifts do not dilute standards—they redefine them to reflect actual learning.

    Beyond reforming teaching and assessment, universities must stop offloading the responsibility for inclusivity onto individual educators. Institutions must invest in faculty development, providing structured training in multilingual pedagogies and equitable assessment models.

    Educators should not be expected to figure out inclusivity on their own – institutions must offer policies with clear, actionable steps that guide them in creating learning environments that serve all students, rather than relying on vague inclusivity statements that sound aspirational but achieve little. This might include mandatory training modules for new staff, collaborative spaces where educators can share inclusive teaching strategies, and formal incentives for inclusive curriculum design.

    At the same time, accreditation bodies must reimagine competency frameworks and accreditation schemes to ensure that inclusivity is not just encouraged but required. These frameworks should move beyond broad, generic statements and introduce enforceable, transparent standards that hold institutions accountable.

    Accreditation should no longer be granted based on superficial inclusivity measures but tied to real, measurable efforts in integrating multilingual pedagogies, equitable assessment strategies, and accessible language support. Regulatory bodies must stop allowing universities to simply claim inclusivity and start demanding that they prove it.

    The future of inclusive higher education hinges on institutions and accrediting bodies being willing to rethink not just their policies but their entire approach to teaching, assessment, and faculty support. Without structural change, inclusivity will remain more of a promise than a practice – a feel-good slogan that limits accountability while leaving students to navigate an inequitable system.

    And for those of us who teach, support, and listen to these students every day, that’s not just a policy failure – it’s a deeply personal one. So, the question remains: are universities truly committed to inclusivity, or are they merely preserving the status quo under the illusion of progress? If it’s the latter, then higher education is not meeting the needs of the very students it claims to support. It’s not enough to say the right things – it’s time to do the right things.

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  • An end to sticking plaster politics? Why the government needs to use its upcoming white paper to take a different approach to immigration

    An end to sticking plaster politics? Why the government needs to use its upcoming white paper to take a different approach to immigration

    The Labour Party was elected to government last year on a promise to reduce net migration. Their victory in the 2024 General Election followed a period in which net migration to the UK peaked at 906,000 and public concerns over migration began to rise again for the first time since the Brexit referendum.

    Unsurprisingly, Number 10 views progress on this issue as central to their re-election prospects. Precisely how the government will look to do this is still unclear, yet recent weeks have seen growing speculation over an immigration white paper which is expected to land pretty soon.

    White paper

    A new approach to immigration is needed. Too often, immigration policy has been dictated by the release of the latest migration figures and so the development of a white paper on immigration in and of itself is no bad thing. Moreover, it provides the government with an opportunity to take a more strategic approach to migration policy.

    Prior to the election, the Labour Party committed to a different style of governing which would end ‘sticking plaster’ politics. But how to apply this longer-term view to immigration policy? To be judged as successful, any new approach to immigration would need to see net migration reduced given their manifesto commitment. As such, tough choices need to be made about where further reforms could be made to reduce the overall number of people coming to the UK.

    This creates some obvious risks for UK universities given the importance of international students to the financial sustainability of our sector. Universities UK (UUK) has been clear that, over the long-term, international recruitment should not be the answer to the financial sustainability of higher education institutions. Instead, we need to work with government on a long-term plan, secure increased investment, and explore new approaches to efficiency and transformation in the sector.

    In the absence of a long-term plan to address the underfunding of the higher education sector, any new approach to immigration would, at the very least, need to enable universities to continue to attract international students to study in the UK to prevent current financial challenges from deteriorating further.

    Three tests

    This is no easy task, but it is possible. So, what could a different course of action on migration policy actually look like? I think there are three clear things we need:

    1. A joined up, coordinated approach.

    2. Look forward not back, (as the Labour Party once encouraged us to do).

    3. Draw a line between temporary and permanent migration.

     

    The left-hand ought to know what the right-hand is doing

    The starting point of any new immigration policy ought to be based on having a joined-up and co-ordinated approach. This may seem obvious but would be a welcome change.

    The key opportunity for the new government is to use their immigration white paper to finally align migration policy with wider government objectives. Based on what the Home Secretary has outlined, at least part of this would be to create much greater join-up between the UK’s visas and skills systems so that immigration is not used as an alternative to training or tackling workforce problems, thereby reducing overall net migration. This is a good start, but the white paper offers an opportunity to go further.

    Under previous administrations, there was a distinct lack of coordination and coherence in policy and strategy. This can be seen most clearly in the development of an International Education Strategy – which set an explicit aim of government policy to grow the number of international students coming to the UK, but which then came up against a Home Office who had been instructed to curb the growth in international students.

    Don’t use the rear-view mirror

    With a clear joined-up strategy, the government should then look to shift the focus of immigration policy away from retrospective net migration trends, towards focussing on future forecasts, thereby creating a more realistic timeframe to achieve their strategy.

    It is quite clear that reducing net migration is going to continue to be the focus of government policy. Yet as we have seen, annual net migration focuses too much on short-term migration trends – be it the increase of people coming from Ukraine, or Hong Kong – and doesn’t focus enough on the anticipated impact of recent policy – such as changes to dependant’s which has led a dramatic reduction in the UK’s attractiveness as a study destination in certain countries.

    By shifting towards long-term projections (measured over a rolling 5-year average), the government could then create the political space to actually achieve their wider objectives. For example, providing a longer-term timeframe to work with employers to implement skills and training initiatives to support those roles where recruitment is primarily met through immigration.

    Any future forecast would, inevitably, be subject to changes and revisions but it would represent a far better metric than basing government policy on retrospective and highly volatile net migration trends from the previous year.

    Separate the temporary from the permanent

    A final welcome change would be for the government to distinguish more between ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’ migration. After all, while many migrants do settle in the UK, many others do not and have little intention of doing so.

    This applies to many international students. They may stay for a few years after their studies, but very few end up remaining in the UK for the long-term and get settlement. Rather than taking students out of net migration – which would only serve to highlight the contribution which international students do make to net migration while ignoring the impact which students do have on housing and local services – the government should look to place greater focus on different types of visas being granted to those coming to the UK.

    There are lots of ways this could be done, but focussing more on those visa routes which lead to settlement (or ‘indefinite leave to remain’) would help improve public understanding of migration and better reflect the fact that many migrants included in the net migration stats do not contribute significantly to the long-term population of the UK.

    Concerns about immigration are unlikely to go away anytime soon, but the opportunity for a better approach is there for the taking.

    Many parts of the world – particularly across the Anglosphere – are currently seeing higher levels of net migration, and how countries respond is an issue facing many governments.

    With aging societies, slowing rates of economic growth, not to mention an increasing number of people displaced due to climate change, conflict, and natural disasters, immigration will continue to be high on the political agenda.

    Through their immigration white paper, the new UK government has a clear opportunity to address this challenge head on and take a different approach to previous administrations and, in doing so, demonstrate that well-managed immigration can be – and indeed is – a force for good.

    In developing a more joined-up approach, while focussing on future projections – rather than retrospective trends – and which makes a clearer distinction between temporary and permanent migration, the UK government could go a long way to developing a more sensible approach to immigration policy.

    The opportunity is there, the question is whether the government will take it.

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  • International students and asylum claims

    International students and asylum claims

    For at least a couple of years there’s been an issue percolating away without much clarity about its extent, causes and consequences – that of international students in the UK applying for asylum either during or following their studies. Staff in universities have at times told us of a noticeable rise in cases, and we also get rumours every now and then of it being on the Home Office radar.

    Over the weekend the government released for the first time some data on asylum claims by student visa holders – previously there have only been figures for successful applications, according to first visa held, which have been buried in the annual “migrant journey” report. These have not painted a particularly clear picture of the real situation.

    So we now learn that, of the 108,000 who claimed asylum in the UK in 2024, 40,000 were from people who had held a visa. Within this group, student visas were the highest share of the total, with 16,000 claims – those on work visas accounted for 11,500, and 9,500 were on visitor visas (all these figures have been rounded to the nearest 500, for some reason). There’s nothing here about the proportion of claims that were successful, or even resolved.

    The stats release with coordinated with an interview with home secretary Yvette Cooper on the front page of The Sunday Times, focusing on the effects of asylum claims on the government’s floundering accommodation system:

    One of the things that became clear as we examined this really rather chaotic system that we inherited is that we have people who are in the asylum accommodation system who arrived in the UK on a student visa, or a work visa, and who then only claimed asylum at the end of their visa. They have then gone into the asylum accommodation system even though when they arrived in the country they said they had the funding to support themselves.

    The Home Office data release highlights that “almost 10,000 people who claimed asylum after having entered on a visa were provided with asylum support in the form of accommodation at some point during 2024” – this figure isn’t broken down by visa type – and that the most common nationalities here were Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.

    So what’s going on?

    In the run-up to last year’s MAC review of the Graduate route, there was a rather convenient Home Office leak to the Daily Mail of the numbers of international students who had gone on to claim asylum, covering the 12 months to March 2023 – and broken down by nationality and even institution. These figures, if accurate, showed 6,136 asylum claims made in that year, so the numbers have only increased since.

    The timing and the pick-up in anti-immigration media was sufficient for the Migration Advisory Committee, in its Graduate route review, to feel the need to comment, if only to damp down hopes that they would consider this as a form of “abuse of the visa system”:

    We note recent reports of an increase in asylum applications from those originally coming to the UK through work and study routes. The government may deem this behaviour undesirable and unintended usage of these routes. However, coming to the UK legally on a work or study visa and proceeding to make a legitimate, admissible asylum application does not constitute abuse. If the government is concerned by the rising number of such applications they should address this issue directly – it does not relate substantively to the Graduate route.

    But the issue hasn’t entirely gone away with the change of government and Labour’s relative de-politicisation of international students. In February, the BBC quoted border security and asylum minister Angela Eagle as having her eye on “those coming on work and student visas and then claiming asylum” – she pins the issue on the disorder the Conservatives left in the asylum system.

    This was then followed by Yvette Cooper’s comments at the weekend, along with the new Home Office data. The home secretary was announcing an expansion of right-to-work checks to gig economy and zero-hours roles in sectors like construction, food delivery, beauty salons and courier services.

    Meanwhile in Canada

    There’s an instructive international comparison here – Canada. Last autumn there was controversy in certain corners of the Canadian media when it emerged that almost 12,000 asylum claims had been made by international students in 2023, rising to more than 13,600 in the first nine months of 2024.

    The potential for political fallout was enough for immigration minister Marc Miller to write to the Canadian College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants over the “important and concerning issue”, saying:

    I am concerned by reports that some of these students are being counselled by third parties to do so and to provide false information… I request that the College look into the possibility that licensed immigration consultants are illegitimately advising international students to claim asylum.

    This took place against a backdrop of the Canadian government instituting a series of caps on international student numbers, and restrictions on post-study work, ahead of a general election this year.

    Policy levers

    The UK government has pledged to substantially cut the number of people in temporary accommodation with claims or appeals pending – it’s a policy objective driven both by Treasury imperatives to cut the ballooning costs and political considerations around being “tough on migration.”

    If international students claiming asylum gains traction as an area for attention – and it’s worth reiterating that the figures show that just shy of 15 per cent of all claims in 2024 were from student visa holders – then probably the easiest policy lever for the government to pull is simply to throttle student and graduate route numbers: avoid overturning any of the restrictive policies introduced by the Conservatives, and harry away at the edges of the system to discourage any kind of return to the totals seen in 2022–23 and 2023–24.

    There’s a question here, though, about whether this is really an HE-related matter. As the statement from one of the universities in the above-mentioned Daily Mail splash said at the time:

    This particular issue is a result of the government’s own asylum policy, which allows visa switching in a way that is outside the direct control of the universities concerned and is not a failing of the higher education sector.

    And the National Audit Office’s recent report on the skilled worker visa found that the number of asylum claims from holders of that visa had risen from 53 in 2022 to 5,300 in the first ten months of 2024. So if it’s not a phenomenon that is restricted to student visa routes, and one that in many cases is about what happens after the period of study, it would appear an over-correction for the government to take any action specifically focused on the higher education system.

    But there are some issues that the government seems to have in its sights. In the Sunday Times interview, there’s a specific mention of the proof of funds that student visa applicants must demonstrate, and how this seemingly conflicts with asylum claims on economic grounds.

    Last September Labour announced an increase in the amount that students must evidence – though it’s still far from being sufficient to live on in most places. But there are plenty of rumours about this system being gamed by agents who assist applicants by parking temporary funds in their accounts, telling them that they will in fact be able to support themselves (and pay off all the debts they’ve accrued) by working while and after studying.

    It’s another example of failure to provide students with clear-cut, realistic information about visa costs leaving them open to exploitation – and an area where the sector should be arguing for more rigour and scrutiny in the proof of funds process, along with a higher sum required, rather than seeing it as a deterrent to prospective students. We’ve also previously covered – anecdotal – reports that students have been advised to apply for asylum when unable to complete degrees within the specified time limits, or potentially for other reasons such as non-payment of fees, though there’s no evidence that this is a widespread phenomenon.

    So there are specific issues here for institutions to get ahead of. Whether that’s enough to move the dial remains to be seen, especially if these latest figures gain prominence and newspapers investigate promises made by agents overseas.

    Protecting students

    Ensuring that vulnerable people are not exploited through misinformation about how they can, supposedly, game the UK’s dysfunctional immigration system should be a priority. If nothing else, there is the pragmatic benefit of heading off further international restrictions and another round of negative HE headlines.

    But more importantly, upholding the right for international students to claim asylum – as well as scientists, researchers and other staff – is of critical importance for preserving academic freedom (among many other things), not just in the UK but around the world. If the growth in claims, and the government’s flailing attempts to address it, ends up tarnishing the need for a humane, well-managed asylum process, everyone suffers. And the higher education sector being on the back foot over asylum, rather than standing up and advocating for its importance, would be a terrible turn of events.

    While the Daily Mail and others might report on growing application numbers from current and former international students as evidence that the UK is not tough enough, too permissive, too generous in the legal protections and recourse it offers to those seeking asylum, the fact remains that it’s an awful system for anyone to get caught up in.

    Just over a year ago in the House of Commons, the now former SNP MP Alison Thewliss reported on a a parliamentary visit to the Bibby Stockholm barge, used by the previous government for asylum accommodation:

    I will take this opportunity to put on record the sadness, confusion and frustration of those on board. Those men felt that they were being punished for some unknown misdemeanour – unable to get any peace and quiet, living in impossibly close proximity to people for months at a time, with no certainty as to when that will end, and their health needs not being properly assessed. The vessel was not intended to be lived on 24/7, and despite the tabloid rhetoric, none of those I met on that boat had come on small boats. Some had been international students, forced to claim asylum when the political situation in their home countries deteriorated. One told me: ‘the longer you are in here, you turn into a person you don’t know.’ How incredibly sad it is that the UK Government see fit to treat people in that way.

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  • These teens can do incredible math in their heads but fail in a classroom

    These teens can do incredible math in their heads but fail in a classroom

    When I was 12, my family lived adjacent to a small farm. Though I was not old enough to work, the farm’s owner, Mr. Hall, hired me to man his roadside stand on weekends. Mr. Hall had one rule: no calculators. Technology wasn’t his vibe. 

    Math was my strong suit in school, but I struggled to tally the sums in my head. I weighed odd amounts of tomatoes, zucchini and peppers on a scale and frantically scribbled calculations on a notepad. When it got busy, customers lined up waiting for me to multiply and add. I’m sure I mischarged them.

    I was thinking about my old job as I read a quirky math study published this month in the journal Nature. Nobel Prize winning economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, a husband and wife research team at MIT, documented how teenage street sellers who were excellent at mental arithmetic weren’t good at rudimentary classroom math. Meanwhile, strong math students their same age couldn’t calculate nearly as well as impoverished street sellers.

    “When you spend a lot of time in India, what is striking is that these market kids seem to be able to count very well,” said Duflo, whose primary work in India involves alleviating poverty and raising the educational achievement of poor children.  “But they are really not able to go from street math to formal math and vice versa.”

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    In a series of experiments, Duflo’s field staff in India pretended to be ordinary shoppers and purposely bought unusual quantities of items from more than 1,400 child street sellers in Delhi and Kolkata. A purchase might be 800 grams of potatoes at 20 rupees per kilogram and 1.4 kilograms of onions at 15 rupees per kilogram. Most of the child sellers quoted the correct price of 37 rupees and gave the correct change from a 200 rupee note without using a calculator or pencil and paper. The odd quantities were to make sure the children hadn’t simply memorized the price of common purchases. They were actually making calculations. 

    However, these same children, the majority of whom were 14 or 15 years old, struggled to solve much simpler school math problems, such as basic division. (After making the purchases, the undercover shoppers revealed their identities and asked the sellers to participate in the study and complete a set of abstract math exercises.)

    The market sellers had some formal education. Most were attending school part time, or had previously been in school for years.

    Duflo doesn’t know how the young street sellers learned to calculate so quickly in their heads. That would take a longer anthropological study to observe them over time. But Duflo was able to glean some of their strategies, such as rounding. For example, instead of multiplying 490 by 20, the street sellers might multiply 500 by 20 and then remove 10 of the 20s, or 200. Schoolchildren, by contrast, are prone to making lengthy pencil and paper calculations using an algorithm for multiplication. They often don’t see a more efficient way to solve a problem.

    Lessons from this research on the other side of the world might be relevant here in the United States. Some cognitive psychologists theorize that learning math in a real-world context can help children absorb abstract math and apply it in different situations. However, this Indian study shows that this type of knowledge transfer probably won’t happen automatically or easily for most students. Educators need to figure out how to better leverage the math skills that students already have, Duflo said. Easier said than done, I suspect.  

    Related: Do math drills help children learn?

    Duflo says her study is not an argument for either applied or abstract math.  “It would be a mistake to conclude that we should switch to doing only concrete problems because we also see that kids who are extremely good at concrete problems are unable to solve an abstract problem,” she said. “And in life, at least in school life, you’re going to need both.” Many of the market children ultimately drop out of school altogether.

    Back at my neighborhood farmstand, I remember how I magically got the hang of it and rarely needed pencil and paper after a few months. Sadly, the Hall farm is no longer there for the town’s children to practice mental math. It’s now been replaced by a suburban subdivision of fancy houses. 

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about applied math was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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