Efforts to reduce UK sector over-reliance on China ‘stalling’

Britain’s research-intensive universities remain heavily dependent on Chinese students despite warnings that many institutions are over-reliant on this single source of income, says a report led by former universities minister Lord Johnson of Marylebone.

Nine Russell Group universities had more than 5,000 students from China, and one institution – UCL – had more than 10,000 Chinese students, roughly a quarter of its 44,000-strong student body, explains the report published by the Policy Institute at King’s College London on 13 September.

Overall, UK universities taught 55,195 undergraduates and 78,265 taught postgraduates from China in 2021-22, with four-fifths of them concentrated in one-fifth of universities – the Russell Group institutions plus six others, it adds.

Of the 18 universities with the highest Chinese enrolments, 17 were Russell Group universities, alongside the University of Arts London (ranked seventh), which had 5,540 Chinese among its total of 12,060 non-UK students.

While India has recently overtaken China as the largest sending nation for master’s-level students, 99,720 in 2021-22, “students from India and Nigeria overwhelmingly gravitate towards post-92 institutions, while Chinese students headed to research-intensives”, says the report, The China Question Revisited: “Derisking” higher education and research.

With student numbers from the European Union falling post-Brexit and domestic annual tuition fees of £9,250 set this month to be “worth materially less than £6,000” in 2012 prices, universities have “few options other than to recruit international students” to cover “loss-making” courses at undergraduate level, it says.

At doctoral level, the reliance on Chinese students is even greater, says the study, which found that 35 per cent of materials science PhDs and 31 per cent of computer science PhDs are from China. About 10 per cent of all academic staff in chemical engineering and electrical or computer engineering are also from China, it adds.

The latest statistics follow concerns that many British universities are too reliant on Chinese students, which prompted the Office for Students (OfS) to write to 23 institutions in February asking to see their contingency planning in case of a sudden interruption to overseas recruitment.

Commenting on the latest findings, Lord Johnson, a visiting professor at King’s, said the “sector continues to follow a ‘cross your fingers’ strategy that decoupling in the future [would] never [be] necessary for China, in the same ways it was for relations with Russia in February 2022”.

On the “China question”, he added that the “government must urgently help universities with a framework for how to maximise the benefits from research collaboration and student and academic mobility, while managing the downsides, including the risks to national security from bad-faith actors and the dangers of over-reliance on a single country”.

The single most effective way for the government to reduce universities’ dependence on Chinese students would be to allow domestic tuition fees to increase with inflation, a policy to which no political party is yet committed, says the study.

It adds, however, that institutions should be required to publish an annual statement on their international student recruitment plans, which would provide greater visibility of current strategies to diversify the international student population.

The sector should also seek to build political support for having more international students by taking proactive steps to address potential fraud, as well as working to address high dropout rates among some nationalities.

The report also suggests that universities should begin “weeding out poor-quality and fraudulent applications by charging an application fee for international students, requiring tuition fees to be paid up front and maintenance funds to be put in escrow at the start of the year”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com