Chief Executive of Universities in the United Kingdom, Vivienne Stern, has expressed concerns about the many policies of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government for preventing international students from coming into the country.
According to the Financial Times, Stern, who decried this situation on Friday, represents more than 140 universities.
He noted that the sector was facing the prospect of a serious overcorrection.
Through the Dependant Visa Ban, the United Kingdom has started the implementation of restricting foreign students from bringing their family members into the country except for post-graduate research and government-funded scholarships.
On January 1, 2024, the UK Home Office reaffirmed on its X account that, “We are fully committed to seeing a decisive cut in migration. From today, new overseas students will no longer be able to bring family members to the UK. Postgraduate research or government-funded scholarships students will be exempt.”
While reacting to this, Stern said, “If they want to cool things down, that’s one thing, but it seems to me that through a combination of rhetoric, which is off-putting, and policy changes . . .[they have] really turned a whole bunch of people off that would otherwise have come to the UK.”
She warned that the UK government should have a review of its foreign education policies to avert what is termed as serious overcorrection.
“The government needs to be very careful: we could end up with, from a policy point of view, what I would consider a serious overcorrection,” she added.
With the £9,250 domestic tuition fee effectively frozen for the past ten years, UK universities have increasingly depended on non-EU students to survive, with fees from non-EU students now accounting for nearly 20 per cent of sector income.
Universities privately warned that numbers have softened sharply in 2024 following a series of hostile policy moves by the government, with indications that enrolments may have decreased by more than a third from important countries, including Nigeria and India.
In January, Sunak emphasized on the changes in government policy to stop international graduate students from bringing family members to the UK, adding the policy was “delivering for the British people.”
“You take those things together, and you’ve got a big problem,” Stern said, warning that the government needed to wake up to the risk posed to a sector that contributes £71bn to the UK economy every year.
