What migration counts miss

A colleague was visiting a university on the outskirts of London a few months ago to attend a talk when he realised that he had arrived at the wrong campus.

Studying a map of the university estate, he was approached by an international student who asked if he needed directions. As it happened, the young man – who was from India – was also heading to the second campus, and he offered to lead the way.

They fell into conversation, and the student explained that he had moved to the UK, like so many others, to study law, and foresaw that the enormous investment he was making would change his life when he returned to India – as he intended to.

He was happy at the university and grateful for the opportunities his degree would open up for him, though he acknowledged that financing his time in England was tough.

He was making ends meet, he explained, by living 50 miles and an hour or more’s commute from the university, in a seaside town.

It was cheaper to live there, and he had also found a job, which he needed to make his international study possible; he was working many hours a week in a residential care home alongside his studies.

He did not mind the work, but confided that he had been subjected to racist abuse by residents while working at the care home.

How, one wonders, does this story tally with how international students are viewed by the population at large?

This student was not independently wealthy and was relying on a combination of private loans and paid work to finance his time at the UK university. The fees he was paying were, in turn, financing all sorts of things at the university in question, going far beyond the costs of his own tuition – the cross-subsidy provided by international fees is now a crucial part of the university funding system.

Was he an economic migrant (or, indeed, a migrant in any sense)?

It is true that he was working, though that was explicitly to finance his education – and in a job in a sector that is heavily reliant on foreign labour and which is not famed for its generous salaries.

He was also unequivocal about his plan to return to India once he had his law degree.

Was he being exploited himself?

He was happy and proud to be studying in the UK, and confident that his degree would get him the career he aspired to when he returned home. He was also happy to be working, though clearly the racism he experienced in his role was a disgrace.

The latest question that is being asked is whether he or international students like him are taking up places that squeeze out domestic UK student places. Or whether they will do so in the future, as the bald financial realities of a frozen domestic tuition fee and the need to subsidise UK students force universities to shift the balance of their student bodies.

As Mark Corver, managing director of dataHE, explained in a recent piece in The Times: “You can imagine in a Russell Group university, the academic staff and the finance director do their calculations and they say we need at least £12,000 per student to run this course at a quality that our academics say is the minimum, then that figure will imply a certain ratio of [UK students paying] £9,000 to £25,000 [a putative international student fee].”

While this financial necessity and the potential implications for domestic places add to the political pressure around international student numbers, we report this week on another development that could, in theory, help to ease some of that politicisation.

A pressure point has long been the fact that international students are included in migration counts, and as such are one of the largest contributors to the net inflows to the UK.

Calls for them to be excluded have led nowhere, but, as we report, there is a growing hope that students could be decoupled from the drive to reduce net migration, with the Office for National Statistics consulting on what a more nuanced reporting of in- and outflows might look like.

Appropriate nuance is often missing from debates about highly politicised issues such as migration, but as the example of the Indian law student demonstrates, the reality of international students’ status, contribution and experience is itself far more nuanced than any statistics suggest.

It is hard to see how anyone hearing his story would see him as anything other than a net positive to the country – and feel dismay and perhaps a degree of shame about some of the experiences he has had to undergo to make that contribution and earn the opportunities his UK degree will afford him.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com