What now for international HE amid the great anglophone visa crunch?

It has been dubbed the “great policy backlash”. After years of being welcomed in, international students have recently found doors being shut in their face.

It all began last May, when the UK banned the vast majority of international students from bringing family members with them. Then, in January, Canada announced a limit on the number of study visas it grants, among other restrictions, before Australia unveiled caps of its own in June.

Together, these three countries were home to over a quarter of all international students last year, but they are not alone in pushing back against perceived overrecruitment of foreign students. Smaller sectors, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, have also sought to curb numbers recently, leading some observers to warn that overseas students have moved from being the “golden goose to sitting ducks”.

Is this confluence of pushback a coincidence or a case of policymakers in the various host countries following each other’s lead? Duncan Ivison, the new vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, believes countries are acting independently, but are driven by similar factors: a post-Covid resurgence in international education coinciding with pressing local issues.

Ivison, a Canadian who was formerly deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, says the restrictions represent different responses to pressures around housing and transport, as well as a backlash against anglophone higher education systems’ financial reliance on international students.

Specifically, Australia confirmed in June that it will cap the number of international students at each university and college from January 2025 amid concern about housing pressures – although legislative delays could see the implementation date pushed back.

Canada had already announced in January that it would cut by about 35 per cent the number of international student study permits it issues in 2024, similarly reacting to public concerns about housing pressures and visa abuse by temporary residents and employers. The caps vary by province, with the nation’s most populous, Ontario, slated for even higher cuts. In September, further cuts of 10 per cent were unveiled for 2025, while spouses of master’s students will be denied work permits unless the programme is at least 16 months long. And, in October, it was announced that the county’s Post-Graduation Work Permit will only be granted to those proficient in English or French, and graduates of sub-degree programmes will only be granted a visa if they have studied subjects related to occupations with long-term labour shortages.

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January was also the point when the UK’s ban on international students bringing their dependants came into effect, the only exception being for those on postgraduate taught courses. A further government proposal to scrap the Graduate Route post-study work visa was headed off earlier this year after a specially commissioned report by the government’s Migration Advisory Committee found no evidence that the visa was being widely abused. But the committee’s annual report for 2023 did caution that the UK’s higher education sector had not considered the effects of international expansion on local housing, and, in June, cross-party thinktank the Social Market Foundation suggested that international student numbers be capped in areas with accommodation shortages.

Campus resources on internationalisation in higher education

Justifying Australia’s caps, treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed in his budget speech that international enrolments have outpaced the creation of dedicated student housing, making “finding housing harder for everyone” – echoing the rationale for caps expressed by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

“The single biggest factor that prompted change is broad anxiety about the cost of housing,” says Gabriel Miller, the president and chief executive of Universities Canada. But he argues that it is wrong to lay the blame at universities’ doors. Canada’s housing shortage demonstrates a “fundamental failure” to build the necessary infrastructure to meet the needs of its population, he says. “The mistake the country made was not building more houses: it wasn’t welcoming international students. The housing shortage is exactly what the words say…and the solution is more housing. If you blame that shortage on newcomers, you’re making them scapegoats.”

Nancy Worth, associate professor in geography at Ontario’s University of Waterloo, says her research proves that international students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis.

“Any increases in population…might be seen as a source of housing pressure, but the reason why houses in Canada are expensive goes much beyond just the question of population, whoever that might be,” she says. Not only does Canada need to build more housing, she thinks universities should consider making it part of an offer to international students.

International student numbers are not the only factor in Australia’s housing crisis either, according to Ly Tran, a professor in the School of Education at Victoria’s Deakin University, noting that the problems intensified during the pandemic when international borders were closed. Moreover, many international students are victims of the crisis, she adds, priced out of the formal rental market and forced to live in the unregulated sector, where they are vulnerable to exploitation because of insufficient predeparture information.

Salvatore Babones, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Sydney who has warned about Australian universities’ overreliance on Chinese students, notes that students are more visible targets for blame for housing pressures than the university administrators who recruited them. Still, he agrees that those pressures are real, and while increased building would, in principle, solve the crisis, he estimates that Australia would need an additional 500,000 units for current numbers of international students – an “inconceivable goal” given that the entire country currently constructs only half that number annually.

“It is a sign of how extraordinarily overwhelming Australia’s international student numbers have become that international students have started warping the national rental market. It is impossible to sufficiently stress how perverse this situation is,” Babones says.

The UK’s dependants ban was initially seen by some as a desperate political gesture by a dying Conservative government that had fixated on immigration as an issue on which it could campaign – just a few years after setting ambitious targets (quickly achieved, in part thanks to a statistical quirk) to expand international higher education. Last month, the new Labour government announced a review of the UK’s international education strategy to “ensure that [it] continues to be an effective tool in increasing the value of education exports, promote policy dialogue and reflect the priorities of education stakeholders, businesses and ministers”. But, for now at least, the dependants ban remains and Labour has talked tough on cutting net migration figures.

The caps in Canada and Australia have also been introduced by centre-left governments – a “striking” fact that, for Ivison, underlines that “universities cannot pretend that we are somehow immune from the incredible volatility that characterises contemporary politics. Unfortunately, international students are the easiest lever to pull when you’re looking at net migration numbers, despite the fact that the evidence of their contribution [to their host nations] is overwhelmingly positive. What’s changed in my time is, unfortunately, the willingness of parties on both the left and the right to pull that international student lever.”

Recent polling for Universities Australia suggests that most urban Australians consider international students a national economic asset. However, just over half believe that capping their numbers will improve housing affordability. And, according to Tran, Australia has recently seen “an increased anti-migration sentiment and a critical lack of understanding of international students in the local communities. International students are seen as ‘others’ or ‘outsiders’, who take away university places, jobs and housing from locals.” The enrolment caps will only cement those perceptions, she fears, obscuring international students’ needs, interests and circumstances.

International education, she says, “has been politicalised more than ever before, which has led to many sectors [around the world] cracking down at the same time. No one stands to benefit, except for politicians.”

In New Zealand, however, polls show that while people are also concerned about international students’ impact on the country’s own housing crisis, they remain very thankful for the economic benefits they bring, and there is no public clamour for a crackdown. Numbers have rebounded strongly since the end of pandemic border restrictions, but observers suggest that since New Zealand’s reopening was slower than elsewhere, the pressures it has experienced have been more limited. And while the country has recently doubled student visa fees, their cost remains in line with other types of visas.

Jenny Lee, vice-president of Arizona International and dean of international education at the University of Arizona, says the global student restrictions are “politically motivated” by populism, nationalism and xenophobia. In the US, however, politicians’ anti-immigration focus is on illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border, and no new restrictions on international students have been mooted. That may change if Donald Trump is re-elected president, although it is worth noting that while international student numbers dropped considerably during his first presidential term, most of that was due to the pandemic.

Prior to that, falls were relatively modest and were regarded as being driven largely by Trump’s America First rhetoric, rather than specific policies aimed at cutting international student numbers (except for the ban on all immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations). A Trump proposal to limit overseas students to four-year visas was cancelled by Joe Biden when he assumed power in 2021, and Trump himself recently proposed that all international students in the US should be offered a green card on graduation.

In the UK, too, while there is a high degree of public concern about historically high net migration figures in general, and illegal crossings of the English Channel in particular, polls have typically shown that the public has a favourable attitude towards international students, with just a fraction of people seeing them as a priority target for reducing immigration – although recent polling suggests that doubts about the value of student migration are rising.

Simon Marginson, emeritus professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, argues that the UK’s efforts to reduce international enrolments are largely motivated by a desire to reduce net migration as a whole – not from any genuine popular opposition to international students. And, in Australia and Canada, too, Marginson is sceptical that international student caps are a result of “bottom up” pressure regarding housing costs. Rather, he believes they are politically performative responses to a more abstract “politics of migration and deglobalisation”. However, he warns that as international students do offer genuine competition for jobs, “if governments thump that drum enough, they’ll get an echo at popular level”.

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Indeed, however much international students contribute economically, any country can have “too much of a good thing”, says Jason Childs, professor of economics at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. “Any system has a capacity. If you hit that capacity and go beyond it, you’re going to get in trouble…There’s just a finite ability to absorb and accommodate.”

For his part, Babones agrees with Marginson that very few people disapprove of student migration per se, but he sympathises with popular concerns about visa abuse.

“[University] presidents and vice-chancellors are, in effect, selling residency permits in Western countries at the price of university tuition,” he says. “They are not meeting the demand for education; they are meeting the demand for visas.” For many international students, he argues, the main purpose of a student visa is to gain access to gig-economy jobs such as driving for Uber or delivering food.

Concerns in that regard often centre on post-study work visas. For instance, ahead of the publication of the UK Migration Advisory Committee’s report in May, right-wing thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies labelled the UK’s Graduate Route visa a “Deliveroo visa”, claiming that many recipients end up in low-paid, low-skilled work (the MAC report found that while graduate visa holders are initially overrepresented in lower-paid work, roughly half of the first cohort after the visa was reintroduced in 2021 moved on to skilled worker visas).

There are also suspicions, particularly in Canada and Australia, that some international students are primarily interested not so much in education as in taking advantage of the route offered by student and post-study visas to permanent residence. According to Mikal Skuterud, professor of economics at the University of Waterloo, some community colleges and private vocational colleges in Canada have been “selling the promise of Canadian permanent residency” to migrants, who often undertake paid work off-campus. But he thinks the federal government is to blame because it has prioritised former international students for permanent residence since 2014.

Such students’ “willingness to pay exorbitant tuition premiums in Canadian college programmes” reflects the value they perceive in permanent Canadian residence, Skuterud believes, not the value they perceive in their education. But he estimates that since the new caps on the number of new permanent residencies granted each year, there are now more than 130,000 former foreign students on temporary visas with no realistic prospect of permanent residency and at risk of slipping into undocumented status, undermining public support for immigration.

“The federal government now finds itself with a wicked problem of its own making,” Skuterud says.

Universities Canada’s Miller agrees that the government’s failure to target the specific abuses that were taking place in some private colleges – and to signal to voters that it was doing so – is impacting both the public’s perception of universities and, via the caps, the institutions themselves. Universities in Canada are “a pillar of our economy” but have become “collateral damage” in a rush to “respond to a political crisis”, he laments.

While it is primarily political concerns that are driving the visa crackdowns, it can also be asked whether there ought to be limits on international recruitment for educational reasons.

The meeting of different cultures has many benefits, but Regina’s Childs questions whether a Canadian university filled almost exclusively with international students is still a Canadian university. And he notes the challenges that different cultural attitudes – some of which emphasise rote learning – can pose for educators.

“International students do bring a ton to the table, but there is no good thing of which you cannot have too much," Childs says. "It is about finding the right balance, whether that’s on a federal level, provincial level or university level.” 

Sydney’s Babones agrees: “Historically, international education was conducted on the principles that hosting international students exposed local students to new cultures and ideas, while the international students themselves benefited from culture and language immersion. These principles break down when international student numbers become excessive.”

Around half of the University of Sydney’s students are from outside Australia – the largest proportion in the country – and a decision has been taken not to stray too far above that because doing so will “change the flavour and the culture” of the university, impacting teaching, assessment, research and international links, according to Gaby Ramia, professor of policy and society at Sydney: “It doesn’t have to change it for the worse: it could be for the better. But changes of that magnitude to an institution in terms of culture…we ought to be cautious about all of that.”

Both Marginson and Babones would ideally keep international numbers at about 15 per cent of total students; Babones would also require that no more than 5 per cent should come from any one country. “Domestic students in all degrees should experience some exposure to international students – and international students in all degrees should have a realistic opportunity to learn English, make friends, and acculturate to the host country,” he says.

Hence, rather than national, regional or even institutional-level limits, he would prefer to limit international students at course level – because the major issue is concentration within particular study programmes.

“International student levels are [currently] so extreme that any reduction in growth would be welcome," he says. "But, ideally, reasonable limits should be placed on the number of international students in any particular degree programme because students experience the university environment at the level of a degree.”

Whatever the educational and cultural arguments for capping international enrolments, however, universities are always likely to fiercely resist them in a squeezed funding environment in which international tuition fees are all that stand between many institutions and oblivion – or, at the very least, serious decline. 

Recent analysis by Times Higher Education has found that home students account for just over half of all tuition fee income at UK universities, with the proportion plunging at some institutions in the past few years. And international education amounts to Australia’s fourth largest export industry, accounting for between 15 (University of Western Australia) and 47 per cent (Sydney) of total revenue for Australia’s Group of Eight universities.

“Frankly, international student fees are essentially bailing out the lack of funding over many, many years from the UK and from the Australian and Canadian governments, especially in relation to research,” says Ivison. “You’ve got a distorted model, to a certain extent.”

Childs is uneasy about the “consistent theme across all these sectors that they are under financial pressure at the same time as [governments] are trying to crack down on international students, which is an interesting dynamic”. But academics are not always comfortable talking up the financial benefits of international students, on the grounds that it can reinforce a perception of them as mere “cash cows”. According to Arizona’s Lee, this can “overshadow some of the non-financial benefits [they bring] that are so essential to student learning”, such as increasing diversity of perspectives. Tran, too, laments that the debate in Australia has projected an impression that the nation sees international students as “tradable commodities and customers of an export industry, rather than as human beings”.

But the sector itself often boasts of the value of international education to the wider economy: in the UK, a 2023 report by Universities UK International, the Higher Education Policy Institute and Kaplan International Pathways estimated that first-year international students in 2021-22 contributed £42 billion over the course of their studies. Overseas students are estimated by NAFSA: the Association for International Educators to have contributed $40.1 billion (£30 billion) to the US economy in 2022-23 and Canada’s own government estimates put the total annual expenditure of international students at C$37.3 billion (£20.7 billion) in 2022.

In Australia, international student spending is commonly estimated to be about A$40 billion (£20.6 billion) a year. However, Babones argues that this figure is “wildly overstated” because it supplements estimates of average spending from Tourism Research Australia with total expenditure on course fees.

“That is to say, [the figure] is based on the fantastical model that a typical international student saves up the full cost of tuition, housing, meals and incidentals, transfers it to an Australian bank, and then lives on that money for the duration of stay in Australia,” he says. While that may be true for a small number of students at elite universities, it is “flatly ridiculous” to suggest that even a large portion of money spent by students at English language colleges and restaurant schools is transferred from abroad, rather than earned in Australia, he says.

Whatever the figure is, the caps seem likely to reduce it. In Canada, the admissions firm ApplyBoard suggested that Canada’s annual international student recruitment may not even reach the caps this year; this may render the additional 10 per cent lowering of the cap in 2025 irrelevant – although the new cap will also encompass master’s and doctoral students. Universities Canada’s Miller has already warned that Canada’s crackdown is hitting universities’ finances “like an earthquake”.

In the UK, too, data reveals a 44 per cent fall in the number of sponsored study-related visas issued in the first six months of 2024; ApplyBoard says this was due to a “tremendous spike” in the withdrawal of visa applications since the dependants ban was announced. In addition, Home Office figures show that the total number of study visa applications submitted between January and July fell by 17 per cent between 2023 and 2024 for main applicants and 83 per cent for dependants. The ban on dependant visas is officially forecast to cost the sector almost £5 billion over the next decade and to have a net cost to the country of about £500 million even taking account of savings to public services.

So where might the big source markets, particularly China and India, head next? The Indian market appears to be very much in flux. Diplomatic tensions had already reduced interest in Canada before the caps were introduced, while the UK’s dependants ban has led to particularly large reductions in applications from India and, especially, Nigeria. In the first six months of 2024 the number of student visas granted to Indians was down 28 per cent and to Nigerians – the nationality considered most likely to want to bring dependants – by 68 per cent.

Western transnational education may be one beneficiary. For instance, Jacinta Allan, the Labor premier of the Australian state of Victoria, recently launched a A$5 million “Yes to International Students” scheme during a trip to India to help the state’s universities and colleges establish offshore partnerships with “reputable” international universities. She also called on the federal government to guarantee that transnational education students would not be counted towards the proposed international enrolment caps, adding that Victoria says “no” to the whole idea of the caps, illustrating political tensions around them.

With Australia’s Senate having recently endorsed the caps bill with only minor changes (including ruling out course-specific caps), the caps seem destined to become law, even if the precise timetable remains uncertain. But it is not impossible that the crackdowns may eventually be scrapped as quickly as they have been imposed; Australia, Canada and the UK, after all, have in recent years more typically been in a race with each other to offer international students the most generous visa terms. Denmark, for instance, last year reversed an earlier decision to reduce the number of university places in English-taught programmes after warnings that it was damaging the economy.

Arizona’s Lee says the US sector – which has the largest number but lowest proportion of international students among major anglophone nations – stands to benefit from the restrictions elsewhere: “It is definitely a welcome opportunity for US institutions to absorb the students that they may have otherwise lost...to Canada and Australia.”

A recent survey suggested that while most prospective international students would prefer a Kamala Harris victory, the outcome of the presidential election will have little bearing on their decision of whether to come to the US or not. Nevertheless, Lee worries that another Trump presidency could create uncertainty for both students and administrators. And Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese studies at the London School of Economics, says that Trump or no Trump, Chinese students will continue to be more wary of the US because of the bad political relationship between China and the US.

Meanwhile, recent data suggests that Canada’s recent restrictions have reduced demand from Chinese students by 20 per cent already. And while the UK’s ban on dependants has had little impact on the Chinese market so far, “the current trend in the West will likely fuel official narratives that Chinese students won’t be received warmly there”, says Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford. Already, the country’s “current political atmosphere is not very encouraging of Chinese students going overseas”, and Mitter predicts this will lead to a decline in Western recruitment of Chinese students over time regardless of visa policy.

One of the countries benefiting from perceptions that the West is unwelcoming appears to be South Korea, with demand from China being one of the major factors behind the record number of international students entering the country this year. Another is France. Chinese students are already France’s third largest market and their numbers rose 6 per cent in 2023-24.

Marginson suggests that the dependants ban notwithstanding, the UK might still benefit from the harsher restrictions in Canada and Australia provided that it doesn’t follow suit. “There will be a lot more people available to come to the UK, that’s for sure – whether they do come or get in, of course, is entirely a matter of visa policy.”

He sees strong similarities between the approach of Australia’s Labor and the UK’s Labour parties, and he warns UK universities that despite Labour’s warm words about international students since its election victory in July and its international education review, the sector should not get complacent because “things can change quickly” – as demonstrated, perhaps, by the Tories’ change of heart on international higher education.

If the legislation to implement Australia’s caps is passed, Ivison thinks it will do “real damage to the Australian international education brand”. But how his new adopted home of the UK responds to what once would have been seen as a major market opportunity remains subject to difficult and unpredictable political currents.