Aficionados of ancient Rome will know that every month had an Ides. For March, May, July and October it fell on the 15th of the month while for the rest of the year it was the 13th. The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) Review of the Graduate Route is due to report on the 14th of May so it seems possible the detail will become clearer the next day.1
Some predict a ritual and metaphorical assassination of the higher education sector to suit the political aims of the Conservative government. It is certainly likely to be a day when, just as in ancient Rome, debts become due. Will MAC deserve the line “Et tu Brutus” from the sector if it echoes, “I come to bury Caesar not to praise him”, in its thinking on the graduate route?
The announcement of the Review led to some frantic rearguard action from the higher education sector which was cut out of the usual, drawn-out Call for Evidence, at a point when the Government needs to reassert its credibility on immigration ahead of an election. There may be some glimmers of hope but the politics seem to be overwhelmingly negative. It comes when the sector is beset by other negative stories and some well-respected voices are suggesting it is time to accept there are problems that need dealing with.
Last Throw of the Dice
It is difficult to know whether the effort from Kaplan, HEPI and the NUS to produce “The Exchequer benefits and costs associated with the Graduate Route visa” in advance of MAC’s publication is going to help. The main argument seems to be that MAC would be remiss in not taking into account the tax return from increasing numbers of international students entering the workforce on the Graduate Route. At a single stroke the students resolve the sector’s funding issues and become a part of the solution to the UK’s debt problems.
We didn’t really need a long and technical paper to tell us that if people go into the workplace they pay tax and contribute to the Exchequer and that if you have more of them they pay more. What the paper doesn’t say is that a logical extension of this self-serving argument would be that if the period of post-study work was extended to five years or even indefinitely, international graduates would pay even more tax. It’s unspoken because, while more years of post study work would probably attract even more international students to UK universities, it would make the student visa look more like a route to residency which most agree is politically unacceptable.
One eye catching and unhelpful point about the report is that it estimates 21% of the Graduate Route visa holders are not in paid employment. That seems a big number and some might suggest that the number is even larger because those not in employment are less likely to respond to being asked their status. It will be interesting to see if MAC has got the linking of HMRC and visa records to give more insight.
A Government, of whatever political persuasion, is more likely to believe that if there are jobs to be filled the better answer is to deal with the UK’s long-term sickness issues.2 At a single stroke you reduce the cost of welfare, get the tax benefit of having more people in work and don’t have to pay the political price of relying on overseas workers. Both main parties know, from the sector’s own research, that the majority of the British public want the same or fewer international students.
Glimmers of Hope
Even if the Report doesn’t go a long way towards changing anybody’s mind there are other straws to cling to. Much has been made of the decline in student visas issued in the first quarter of 2024 being a strong signal for the Government not to “overcorrect” on the issue by taking further action. The Home Office deadpanned by saying that, “the full effect of recent policy changes and any other impacts” would not be known until the peak in applications in August and September.
The decline in dependent visas is a big headline number but commentators including Dave Amor have noted dependent visas are only back to 2021 levels and while main applicants are down “applications without dependents sounds like they are up.” There is also the impact of the decline in Nigeria’s currency driving some of the changes. For a Government under pressure from its own back-benches on immigration it seems unlikely the numbers are down enough.
In that respect, the timing of the MAC review is interesting in that Cleverly demanded a mid-May response without any clear or evident reason. It may be that he plans to take its recommendations and use them, either positively or negatively, for a publicity blitz around the release of the “Immigration system statistics, year ending March 2024” scheduled for 9.30am on 23 May, 2024. The platform provided by the first quarter figures, the MAC review, and then the yearly figures is a decent campaigning rhythm to reinforce his statement that “Over the coming months, we will continue to show the pace of our progress as we deliver the control the public rightly expect.” It may even be the first bit of positioning for a post-election leadership run.
Let’s Get Cynical
The politics of the matter seem simple and the defection of Tory MP Natalie Elphicke to Labour with the accusal, “It’s clear they [the Tory government] have failed to keep our borders secure and cannot be trusted” will only have hardened the lines. The imperative is to retake control of the immigration debate, challenge Labour’s position ahead of the general election and perhaps even reduce their flexibility if they form the next Government. The interests of the higher education sector do not even feature in that calculation.
The last Labour government has long been known for leaving the infamous note for the incoming Chancellor, “I’m afraid there is no money”. It haunted them in future elections and it is doubtful that the Conservatives will make the same mistake. Far better to hand Labour an impoverished sector and draw a distinctive line on post-study work rights that makes it even harder to patch over gaps in funding with international student fee revenue.
So, the Conservative’s would gain twice by limiting post-study work. The immediate gain is the impression of firm government, a populist stance on a divisive issue and a sop to the troublesome right wing of the party. In the longer term, presuming an election loss, it hands the incoming Government a significant and worsening university funding situation with limited room for maneuver without seeming soft on immigration.
Pathway Woes
Almost a sideshow for now are the other reviews set in motion when the Sunday Times set a hare running with its slightly ill-formed attack on international pathways. Universities UK leapt into action with a review by the Quality Assurance Agency that seems likely to report in June 2024 (if the link with the scope is correct). The Department of Education was instructed to “investigate allegations of bad practice by agents” although it’s a little difficult to find when any outcome is expected.
Pathway operators and by default universities could really do with the reviews not hampering the growth of International Year One programmes or requiring significant policing of agent activity. Times are tough enough already. Evidence of that came with the completion of reporting from INTO’s joint venture portfolio showing that INTO enrollments were still 23.6% down on 2018 for continuing joint venture businesses.
In a previous iteration of this graph in another blog and before reporting from INTO University of East Anglia, I had presumed that the joint venture would have made some progress in 2022/23. In reality there was a further collapse from 310 to 241 students year on year which puts it 62.8% down on 2018. The only bright spot was that the wholly owned Manchester operation hit record high numbers in the year.
Source: INTO Joint Venture Annual Reports
The success of INTO Manchester seems ironical given the probability that Navitas was favourite for the £150m Embedded International Study Center contract at Manchester Metropolitan University. Uncertainties around UK international student visas seem likely to have held up further progress at a point when Navitas must already have been smarting at losing the University of Leicester and University of Northampton as partners. Evidence of another pathway operator with some issues to resolve is Kaplan at the University of York.
Just for completeness, on what some consider the ‘big four’, are the problems at Study Group which were exacerbated by the Daily Mail singling them out in a front page splash as sponsoring 804 student who then claimed asylum. The Mail makes much of the “secret Home Office database” as the source of the story but at least as far back as March 2023 the UK Visas and Immigration Study Sector Brief was noting the trend. Any suggestion student visas are being subverted in order to secure a permanent place in the UK will be used as further evidence the sector is out of control.
Voices of (T)reason
In that context there was a small breath of fresh air from Professor Wendy Alexander at the recent International Higher Education Forum conference in May 2024. She is reported as urging the sector, “We really need to be a little more self-reflective about it. The first way to build trust is to concede there was a problem..”. In that respect she echoes a broader point made by ex-Sheffield Hallam vice chancellor, Professor Chris Husbands, who in July 2023 was suggesting the sector was in danger of “tacitly defending a system that it knows is not sustainable.”
Jo Johnson and Vivienne Stern have also been talking the language of avoiding “over-correction” and “serious overcorrection” which seems to be code for accepting that a correction was reasonable and maybe an acceptance that the sector has lost the argument for the status quo. Slightly off-topic but it was amusing to see Johnson suggesting that the Teaching Excellence Framework should be the guiding light for allowing universities to raise domestic fees. Of 228 universities in TEF 2023 only three were ranked as “requires improvement” overall (11 were requiring improvement on student experience and 9 on student outcomes). Basically, he meant all universities.
Tom Petty suggested that “the waiting is the hardest part” but there is good reason to think that the reality might become even tougher after May 14th. Even then, the sector’s problems aren’t all about international tuition fee revenue even though it has offered a sticking plaster for a few years. The old stock market dictum “sell in May then go away, don’t come back until St Leger’s Day” is a good idea for anyone considering UK universities or university pathway operators as a good bet. Come September some of the dust will have cleared and we may even be seeing the election warming up with policy statements on the future shape and size of higher education.
NOTES
- It doesn’t really matter if not. The headline just had to be written and justified.
- Both parties are focusing on the issue of the growth in long-term sickness and solutions are likely to form part of the election agenda. The Conservatives, not surprisingly, are calling it as ‘sick note culture’ while Labour has accepted that a problem exists and is “..threatening the future of the sustainability of our finances and the future of our public services”
Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay