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The number of international students applying to UK universities has remained far below recent levels, despite signs of a slight recovery this month, leaving some institutions facing financial crisis.
Data from Enroly, a web platform used by one in three international students for managing enrolment, shows a 35 per cent drop in deposits for places on UK university courses starting next month compared with August 2023.
This shows a slight improvement on May when the drop was 57 per cent compared with a year earlier.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said last month that the new Labour government wanted to welcome international students. She criticised the negative rhetoric of the previous Conservative administration which successive Tory ministers had deployed as they tried to cut overall migration figures.
Analysts warned that, despite the slight recovery, the sector still faced mounting financial challenges after coming to rely heavily on higher-paying overseas students to make up for a decade-long freeze in domestic tuition fees.
Paul Kett, senior education and skills adviser at PwC UK, said the latest data signalled a “welcome” return of confidence, but cautioned that forecasts for international recruitment “remain overly optimistic”.
“This is still going to be a challenging and critical recruitment round for many,” he added. “The impact on individual institutions will be highly variable depending on their relative attractiveness and which markets they are predominantly focused on. It’s likely some will need to take further significant action to secure their financial sustainability.”
The data showed a significant decline in students from Nigeria and India, two of the three largest international markets for UK universities. Deposits from Nigerian students fell by 65 per cent, and from Indian students were down by 44 per cent, when compared to August in 2023.
Smaller markets, such as Kenya and Nepal, showed increased demand against a year ago.
Jeffrey Williams, Enroly chief executive, said the “early signs” of recovery reflected efforts by the new government to stabilise immigration policy.
“Concerns regarding the potential elimination of the postgraduate route work visa have been assuaged,” he said, adding that this had been helped by “continued political uncertainty” in other markets such as Australia and Canada.
Harry Anderson, deputy director of Universities UK International, the sector lobby group, said the international environment remained volatile for universities as they continued to look to diversify the range of countries from which they recruited students.
Labour has so far retained the Conservative’s ban on most graduate students bringing family members, which Anderson said would still present competitive challenges for UK institutions.
“Most of our competitor destinations do allow students to bring their family members, and most of the growth in recent years has been in postgraduate taught courses where students typically tend to be older and have family members.
“Still, the hope is that stability signalled by the new government will benefit the next admissions cycle after the turbulence of the last 18 months. But the sector needs to be working hard with embassies to communicate this,” Anderson added.
The regulator, the Office for Students, has already started to prepare for a potential wave of university insolvencies, advertising for a contract of up to £4mn for professional services companies to handle restructuring programmes.
It made the move after financial accounts revealed over-optimistic assumptions about the growth of overseas recruitment in the next few years. In its annual report this May the OfS accused universities of “optimism bias” for using projections of 35 per cent growth in international entrants in 2022-26.
