This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
“Easy in, easy out.” This is not an advertising slogan for a senior-citizen bath chair. It’s how Chinese students now describe UK higher education, where both getting a place and getting a degree have never been easier — provided you have a pile of cash to spare.
When students from the Chinese educational system choose to describe British universities as “like an assembly line”, something has clearly gone awry.
The subject of international students in UK universities is complex and multifaceted. Yet it is almost exclusively discussed in financial terms. How much should they pay? How much should they cross-subsidise the cost of teaching British students? How much financial risk does a decrease in overseas demand pose?
All these questions matter greatly but remain secondary to the crucial issue: who are our universities meant to serve best, or, put another way, what are these institutions actually for?
Precious few, in either government or higher education, have dared to tackle this question head-on. Perhaps the solution is too difficult, or the answer too disruptive, for a sector now “too big to fail”.
Regrettably, though, every British university has been chasing the short-term benefits of foreign income with such frenzied excitement that none has paused to reflect.
Before 2015, annual growth of student numbers was capped at 5 per cent. That year, however, the restriction was removed. Since there was little increase in domestic demand and EU numbers declined during and after Brexit, the growth came from wealthy overseas students.
(That privileged home students, who had benefitted from private education, were being replaced by appreciably more privileged foreign students, who had benefitted from private education, did not upset the moral calculus of anti-independent-school campaigners.)
The rapid growth was cheered on by the Conservative government. In 2019 Theresa May announced the intention to increase the total international student cohort to 600,000 by 2030. So great was the momentum that this goal was achieved in 2020/1.
The government is aware of rampant visa abuse
Annual international enrolments peaked at 463,000 in 2022/23 and remained above 400,000 for the two subsequent years. Whilst numbers from China have grown steadily, there has been major increase from India, with these two countries accounting for almost half of overseas numbers. Next are Pakistan and Nigeria.
Sixteen per cent of undergraduate students are international but at postgraduate level the proportion is 64 per cent (roughly 300,000 students per annum). Whilst many universities have seen moderate growth since the cap’s removal, some have scaled up immensely by enrolling huge numbers of international students.
Between the academic years 2015/16 and 2024/25, several established universities grew by many thousands of students, such as Bristol (9,840), King’s College London (10,880) and University College London (14,345).
But these figures are trivial compared to younger institutions: Canterbury Christ Church University nearly tripled in size over these ten years by adding 22,205 students. On a different plane entirely are Regent’s College London, which grew fourteen times in size, by expanding from 500 students to over 7,000, and Arden University, headquartered in Coventry and given university status in 2015, which grew 32 times by enrolling 25,000 students.
To give a sense of the dependency on international enrolment, we need only glance at London-based BPP University: almost 70 per cent of students are from overseas, and, in 2024/25 alone, it admitted almost 12,000 Indian students.
The economic implications of this have been material. In the 1990s roughly 5 per cent of tuition income came from overseas students, now it stands at a quarter. This has left universities exposed to changes in international demand, as became very obvious during the Covid pandemic. Deep problems still endure, which can prompt absurd headlines such as this from last year’s Times: “Nigeria currency crisis leaves Dundee University fighting to survive”.
Concerns extend beyond shaky finances and questionable standards. The government is aware of rampant visa abuse. A Home Office paper from May 2025 spoke of “exploitation” where visas are used as an entry point for living and working in the UK without any intention to complete the course, and [there are] increasing numbers of asylum claims from students at the end of their course, even though nothing substantive has changed in their home country whilst they have been in the UK.
Over half of study visa holders now transition to another visa. And between 2020 and 2024 the annual number of people on study visas who later claimed asylum rose nearly six times, to 16,000.
So stark has the problem become that, in March this year, the government announced the complete suspension of study visas for Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan.
Whilst the number of student visas has started to decline (from 484,000 in 2022 to 407,000 in 2025), the total figure remains so large that we need to return to the question: Cui bono?
