Tag: White

  • Podcast: Immigration white paper, Jacqui Smith

    Podcast: Immigration white paper, Jacqui Smith

    This week on the podcast we get across the government’s new immigration white paper. What does cutting the graduate route visa from two years to 18 months mean for international students and universities?

    Plus we examine the proposed 6 per cent levy on international student fees and tighter compliance requirements that could put some institutions at risk.

    We also discuss Skills Minister Jacqui Smith’s Telegraph op-ed criticizing universities for “losing sight of their responsibility to protect public money” – are her concerns reasonable?

    With Smita Jamdar, Partner and Head of Education at Shakespeare Martineau, Roscoe Hastings, Director of Teaching Excellence and Student Experience at the University of Exeter, James Coe, Associate Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson.

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    Everything in the immigration white paper for higher education

    There are lots of ways to be more transparent about university finances

    Lessons from innovating in our student support model

    Euro visions: A playbook to fight the populists in the Netherlands

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  • The Immigration White Paper — an Indian student’s perspective

    The Immigration White Paper — an Indian student’s perspective

    Last week, I arrived back in London on a high. I’d spent five weeks in India with British colleagues promoting the benefits of U.K. higher education in seven cities. My audience was some of the most talented and entrepreneurial young people in the world, and they have plenty of choices about where to follow their dreams. But I know from my decade as Chair of the U.K. National Indian Students and Alumni Union (NISAU) that British education is an extraordinary opportunity for Indian students and their host country. It’s a win-win if ever there was one in talent, skills, investment and friendship. And all this was topped off with the announcement of the long-awaited India-UK trade deal. We were filled with possibility.

    Yet as soon as I stepped off the plane, I was faced with a barrage of news stories about the UK Immigration White Paper. Would all our hard work be put at risk? Surely we would not jeopardise the Graduate Route Visa so vital to Indian graduates and hard-won by many, including Indian students and alumni.

    So now the White Paper is published, what is our take on it?

    The Graduate Route

    First, let’s be clear. Our worst fears were averted. NISAU genuinely welcomes the Government’s decision to retain the Graduate Route and acknowledges the significant engagement that has taken place with stakeholders across the sector. NISAU has worked extensively over the past decade — and particularly intensively in the last year — with policymakers across all major political parties, including many now in government, to advocate for the continuation of this essential route.

    Of course, there are still worries. Any change is worrying when witnessed from thousands of miles away. So while we are relieved that the Graduate Route has been preserved — albeit with a modestly reduced duration — we urge that its implementation, and that of the wider reforms, be approached with care, clarity, and collaboration. Getting this right will shape the UK’s standing as a top destination for global talent in the years ahead.

    Why should we worry about a white paper on immigration?

    But here’s the rub. Many of us feel the UK’s worries about immigration are being applied inappropriately. International students are a distinct, high-contribution, temporary category of migration. They fund their own education, power innovation in universities, sustain local economies and build enduring bilateral ties between the UK and countries around the world.

    They (we) should be celebrated, not treated through the same policy lens as other forms of migration. Doing so risks undermining one of the UK’s most globally admired assets: its higher education sector.

    Universities, too, are one of Britain’s most powerful strategic assets. They drive regional growth, advance global research, and help produce the high-skilled workforce the country urgently needs. Supporting them — and the students who choose them — must remain a national priority.

    It’s an old argument, but worth repeating because it’s true. International students bring enormous benefits to the UK — to our high streets, workplaces, and campuses. They contribute billions to the UK economy each year, and the fees they pay help sustain vital subjects like Engineering and Medicine — courses which are essential to Britain’s long-term prosperity and global competitiveness.

    International students also create employment and support domestic skills through their impact on the wider economy and the cross-subsidy they provide for UK teaching and research.

    The White Paper talks about impact. But any local impact assessment or review of the domestic skills landscape should begin here — with a recognition that the presence of international students uplifts opportunities for UK nationals, not competes with them. And so we reiterate, no matter how often this request is dismissed, international students must be taken out of the net migration targets for purposes of robust policymaking and to ensure future efforts to reduce regular forms of migration don’t endanger this huge benefit.

    Home thoughts from abroad

    The White Paper was aimed, naturally, at a domestic political audience, but the world was listening. International communication must be extensively managed and properly executed — proactively and urgently — especially during this peak recruitment period. Panic must not be allowed to set in among current and prospective students. Immediate clarity is needed on who is affected and how.

    It’s easy to forget what this takes, and GREAT campaign funding, which promotes campaigns like Study London, has already been cut by 41%. How will the great stories we should be telling about global education reach the right students in an appropriate way?

    Think of the impact of our recent debates on Indian students, the largest users of the Graduate Route. For 70% of Indian students, a strong post-study work offer is the single most important factor in deciding where to study abroad. The ability to gain significant international work experience is critical. As we told the Migration Advisory Committee, work is not the same as work experience.

    What we need now are proactive, student-focused communications, delivered by those who understand how to engage students effectively. NISAU has already started evidence-based communications. We stand ready to scale our role in partnership with UK stakeholders, but we must be quick. Rumours and bad actors must not be allowed to shape the UK’s story and, as Mark Twain said, a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on. So we encourage a joined-up national communications effort, led by government and supported by trusted sector voices like NISAU, to ensure international students receive accurate, timely and reassuring guidance.

    Skills and Immigration Alignment

    Here we see real opportunity. We strongly support the Government’s move to align immigration policy with domestic skills development. This is not new to us. NISAU has long championed this principle. Our advocacy has enabled productive sectoral dialogue, including at our 2024 and 2025 national conferences, where we specifically advanced the case for better integration of immigration, training pipelines and national workforce planning. Now we look forward to working with stakeholders to ensure these reforms drive opportunity, not exclusion. International students and graduates should be part of this thinking, not passive recipients.

    Tighter Regulation of Agents

    We should be afraid, though, of naming and fixing problems. NISAU has spent nearly a decade calling for tighter regulation of education agents, so we are pleased to see this now reflected in government policy. We, of all people, see the cost of this being done badly.

    However, implementation is everything. We urge clarity and accountability in the system, and ask for specific answers to:

    • What is the penalisation mechanism for misconduct by agents?
    • How can universities transparently share information on agent breaches?
    • What channels will be created for students to report agent wrongdoing safely and easily?

    So we recommend the following actions to ensure transparency and integrity:

    1. A sector-wide cap on agent commission to ensure that student interests are prioritised over volume incentives.
    2. Mandatory publication by universities of agent appointment processes and the fees paid to each agent, after every intake.
    3. Immediate monitoring of potential oligopolistic aggregators in the agent market, whose dominance may compromise student choice, competition, and accountability.

    Agent reform must centre student welfare, market integrity, and institutional accountability.

    Talent Route Enhancements

    And finally, we welcome the strengthening of the Global Talent, Innovator Founder, and High Potential Individual routes. These are important to the UK’s economic ambitions, especially in strategic sectors such as AI, deep tech, and life sciences. But talent does not always arrive ready-made. It is nurtured — often from within our international student community.

    International graduates are a strategic talent pool that can help meet the UK’s workforce gaps, drive innovation in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and build globally competitive businesses. Retaining them through structured graduate-to-founder pathways is not just in students’ interests — it is in Britain’s. We therefore urge:

    • A seamless pipeline between student, graduate, and entrepreneurship routes.
    • The right for students to start businesses while studying.
    • A bespoke international graduate start-up pathway, enabling the UK to tap into a future generation of founders, many of whom could otherwise take their innovation elsewhere.

    Supporting graduate outcomes must also become a central focus across the UK higher education sector. A recent survey revealed that only 3% of international graduates found employment through their university careers service, highlighting a clear opportunity for improvement in how students are supported beyond the classroom.

    This is not only a challenge for international students; domestic students, too, require more tailored and effective career support to meet the evolving demands of today’s job market.

    NISAU has long championed the need for improved careers provision, including through regular engagement with universities and stakeholders, and as a central theme at both our 2024 and 2025 national conferences. At a plenary session during our 2025 conference in February, we demonstrated how the absence of structured university-led careers support has given rise to an unregulated ecosystem of social media ‘careers coaches’ — many of whom charge students significant fees, often without delivering meaningful outcomes. We recognise that many universities are already taking meaningful steps to enhance the student experience and graduate outcomes. From employability hubs to expanded industry partnerships, we welcome and encourage these efforts — and believe they can be further amplified through shared best practice, consistent investment, and greater collaboration with student-led organisations such as NISAU.

    The White Paper on Immigration is challenging on skills. We call for a sector-wide paradigm shift — one that places measurable, inclusive, and industry-informed employability support at the heart of the student experience and ensures that students are not left to navigate their futures unsupported or exploited.

    There is much more to say. We are concerned about a lack of clarity on graduate-level jobs and the financial impacts of all these changes on the universities that attract global students in the first place. Nor do we want to be seen only as investors. The ‘best and the brightest’ are not necessarily the ‘rich and the richest’.

    We urge that any levies or associated costs placed on universities be ring-fenced for reinvestment into student support, careers, and compliance infrastructure, rather than passed on to students. Global education is changing. International students are discerning, strategic, and have options. If the UK offer weakens, the best talent will go elsewhere. The UK at the moment has a competitive advantage — that advantage must be protected through consistency, clarity, and commitment to the student experience. Let’s secure a UK that remains open, ambitious and globally competitive in higher education and in so many other ways.

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  • Liberty University in Black and White

    Liberty University in Black and White

    Liberty University, one of the largest Christian universities in the world, presents a striking contrast between its largely white residential campus and a more diverse, working-class population studying online. This divide highlights ongoing questions about race, access, and culture in American higher education—especially in religious institutions that promote traditional values while navigating a changing demographic and social landscape.

    A Whiter Campus

    As of 2021, Liberty’s Lynchburg, Virginia, residential campus remains overwhelmingly white. Seventy-four percent of students living and studying on campus are white, with only 4% identifying as Black or African American, 5% as Latino, and 2% as Asian or Pacific Islander. Less than 1% of residential students identify as Native American. In contrast to the national trend of increasing diversity on college campuses, Liberty appears to be growing whiter. In fact, the number of African American students on campus has declined in recent years, raising concerns about how welcoming the university is to students of color.

    This demographic imbalance is not new. Liberty University has a long history of racial segregation and discrimination, particularly in its formative years under founder Jerry Falwell Sr., who defended segregation in the 1960s and opposed civil rights legislation. While Liberty’s public stance has changed over the decades, the legacy of those positions still casts a long shadow.

    A More Diverse Virtual World

    Meanwhile, Liberty University Online (LUO) paints a different picture. In 2017, only 51% of its undergraduate population identified as white, compared to 15.4% who were Black or African American. Hispanic and Latino students made up 1.7%, and students of two or more races, 2.3%. A significant 26.5% of LUO students were categorized as “race/ethnicity unknown,” potentially obscuring additional diversity. These students come from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and 86 countries, with more than 30,000 military students and over 850 international students among them.

    LUO students are also disproportionately older, more likely to be working full-time, and often seeking degrees for career advancement or personal growth rather than the traditional “college experience.” Many are first-generation college students or part of the educated working-class navigating life through faith, family, and financial constraints. In contrast to the traditional campus, LUO’s virtual classrooms are where Liberty more closely resembles the multiracial and socioeconomically diverse America it often claims to serve.

    The Racial and Class Divide

    This bifurcation between Liberty’s on-campus and online populations underscores a larger tension within the university: a cultural and racial divide that mirrors the broader fissures in U.S. society. The residential campus, steeped in conservative Christian traditions and a homogeneous student body, promotes a culture aligned with white evangelicalism. Meanwhile, its online division serves a more varied student population—many of whom are drawn to Liberty for its affordability, flexibility, and religious identity, but may not share in the campus culture or feel represented by its leadership and branding.

    Reports of problems faced by Black students on campus—including concerns over campus climate, lack of representation among faculty, and curriculum that minimizes racial history—suggest that Liberty’s commitment to diversity is uneven at best. While the university has made modest gestures toward inclusion, critics argue that these efforts are often performative and fail to address systemic issues rooted in the institution’s founding principles.

    Conclusion

    Liberty University’s dual identity—as a white-dominated, conservative campus and a more diverse, online workforce training hub—raises difficult but necessary questions about race, class, and the role of religion in higher education. For an institution that claims to train “Champions for Christ,” the challenge remains whether it can reconcile these differences or if the divide will only grow starker in the years ahead.

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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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  • White House order prioritizes AI in schools

    White House order prioritizes AI in schools

    Key points:

    • The Trump administration is elevating AI programs in K-12 education
    • The human edge in the AI era
    • Report details uneven AI use among teachers, principals
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    A new executive order signed by President Trump takes aim at AI policies in K-12 education by “fostering interest and expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) technology from an early age to maintain America’s global dominance in this technological revolution for future generations.”