Levy puts participation in Erasmus in doubt, says Europe expert

UK universities could be forced to rethink participation in the European Union’s Erasmus+ exchange scheme if they end up being charged the international student levy on all enrolments, a political scientist has warned.

Anand Menon, founding director of the European Research Institute at the University of Birmingham, said the issue was an example of the “absurdities” of government policy that institutions are having to deal with.

Ministers are set to impose a £925 per-student tax on international admissions from 2028 and are yet to clarify whether it will apply to those coming to the country on exchange placements.

Several respondents to a recent consultation on the levy raised concerns about its impact on Erasmus but the government is yet to respond to the findings.

Students on Erasmus exchanges do not typically pay fees to host institutions but, given that the levy is now a flat per-student charge rather than a percentage, it might still apply.

The UK has agreed a deal with the EU and will spend more than £570 million a year from 2027 to support student mobility between the UK and Europe.

Menon, who previously ran the academic thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, said that the levy could prove a barrier to participation in Erasmus.

“One of the absurdities that’s happened recently... is that the UK’s just paid more than half a billion pounds for a year’s access to Erasmus, a scheme which loads of universities are having second thoughts about participating in,” Menon said at DETcon, a conference held by edtech company Duolingo on 10 June.

“Why? Because even those Erasmus students that are coming in, without needing to pay fees, are subject to the international student levy, so it will actually cost universities money.”

He said it showed a “lack of joined-up thinking” and the “inability, on the part of any politician at the moment…to speak about the good that higher education does”.

Menon added that government policies around higher education were also helping to fuel negative perceptions among the public about the value of universities.

“The… thing I would say about attitudes towards universities is that they’re partly a function of the fact that we have crazy government policies towards universities, particularly when it comes to finances,” Menon said.

“This government’s attitude towards universities is a bit like my attitude towards my own finances, which is if you don’t think about them or talk about them, they’ll sort themselves out soon enough.”

Speaking at the same event, former home secretary David Blunkett said he felt that dealing with the issue of small boat crossings would relieve some of the attention on international student numbers.

“I think the issue that underpins people’s view of migration at the moment is the small boats,” Blunkett said.

“If that were resolvable”, the Labour peer suggested, “then we could probably have a sane debate” and successfully demonstrate “that international students are a major benefit to the country”.

Both agreed that universities need to do more to engage with Reform, considering the possibility of party leader Nigel Farage’s premiership becoming ever more likely.

“It’s plausible Nigel Farage will become prime minister,” Menon said. But he felt that some universities had become “too overtly political” and had a “reluctance even to engage” with Reform, despite their popularity in public polling.

Jamie Arrowsmith, chief executive of Universities UK International, said there was a “real problem” that universities were “trying to second guess what the policy environment is going to be in the future”, pointing to recent dramatic shifts in visa rules.

This month the Home Office unveiled plans to strip universities of the right to recruit international students if too many subsequently drop out, with new sponsorship rules to introduce a sliding scale of penalties for higher education institutions that “fail to recruit responsibly”.

Arrowsmith called it “actually among one of the most significant, most robust rules that have been implemented anywhere in the world”.

In March, the government also imposed what it called an “emergency brake” on study visas for citizens of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, following a surge in asylum claims from those who entered the country as students.

Arrowsmith said “it was a real shock for the sector that this could happen” and that there “is always the risk” new brakes could be imposed.

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com