Universities will offer to curb the rise in overseas students in return for greater stability and the chance to increase tuition fees, as part of a plea for the government to ease the sector’s growing financial crisis.
A “blueprint” to be published by vice-chancellors will call for tuition fees in England to rise in line with inflation and for greater government financial support.
The Universities UK (UUK) blueprint will include proposals on institutions voluntarily “managing international student population” growth, particularly for areas facing accommodation shortages or pressure on local services. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has committed to reducing net immigration across the UK.
Domestic undergraduate tuition fees in England have been capped at £9,250 since 2017 but have been eroded in value by high inflation, forcing universities to rely on uncapped tuition fees from international students to balance their books.
Vivienne Stern, UUK’s chief executive, said the sector needed to think about the impact of international students, and take into account potential flashpoints such as availability of rental accommodation and what support universities provide when increasing student intakes.
“We don’t want to restrain growth in international student numbers but we need to have sustainable and well-managed solutions,” Stern said.
The blueprint says that each domestic undergraduate costs universities in England between £12,000 and £13,000 a year to teach and support. While the document does not ask for a specific amount, it says that a tuition fee increase and greater government investment is needed to halt the sector’s “slide into decline”.
Downing Street declined to answer questions about Starmer’s position on increasing tuition fees, or say when the government would carry out its promised review of university funding.
Earlier this month Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, told UUK’s annual conference that she was considering “all the options” but that there were “no easy answers or quick fixes” on funding.
Prof Duncan Ivison, vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, told the UUK conference: “The Labor government in Australia has just introduced caps on international students, which will result in a roughly 30% cut to international students at most of the research-intensive universities in Australia, and Labor is a progressive-left government, which is very close with the Starmer government.”
Ivison, previously a senior academic at the University of Sydney, said populist concerns about migration remained a “disruptive force” that universities needed to address.
UUK also wants maintenance grants to be reinstated in England for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and for maintenance loans and eligibility to be increased in line with inflation.
Alex Stanley, the National Union of Students’ vice-president for higher education, said students were also in financial distress.
“Students must not be expected to foot the bill for the university funding crisis. Increasing tuition fees would only up the debt burden on students, especially those from the poorest backgrounds, and further punish students who are investing in their futures and the future of the country,” Stanley said.
“Our institutions clearly need more money but so, too, do students.”
The blueprint, to be published shortly, includes detailed chapters on regulation, local growth and opportunity. Because university funding is devolved, the proposals vary according to national policies.
On international students, the proposals are for the government to maintain stability in its visa regime, in contrast to the restrictions imposed by the last Conservative government that led to steep falls in recruitment from overseas.
Stern said the government needed to remove international students from UK immigration statistics to recognise that students were most likely to return home once their courses had ended. “After talking about this for years, we’ve got to fix this, and they need to get on with it,” she said.
In return, universities would also impose greater regulation on international recruitment, such as the use of agents, as well as greater management of student numbers based on local conditions.
A section on research and innovation, written by the Labour peer Peter Mandelson, will say that the UK needs to reform how it funds cutting-edge science in order to become “a country of the future and not the past”.
The section argues that innovative research is too thinly spread around the country and disconnected from industry. Furthermore, universities sustained a £5.3bn deficit on their research activities in 2022-23, according to the Financial Times.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We have inherited a challenging set of circumstances in higher education. The education secretary has taken the crucial first step of refocusing the role of the Office for Students on key areas such as monitoring financial sustainability, to ensure universities can secure their financial health in the longer term.
“By bringing economic stability and growth, we can fix the foundations of our economy, strengthen our higher education system and rebuild Britain.”
