After Brexit a Fork in the road for UK higher education.

This article was first featured in University World News on 23/11/20 - https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=2020112314344347

Faced with two diverging paths the great American poet Robert Frost tells us: “I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”

We are at a point when the United Kingdom needs to consider which path to take if it is going to deliver on the government’s target of 600,000 inbound international students by 2030.

Asia Careers Group has covered prospects for three other major international higher education destinations – Could Australia be the student mobility comeback kid?, Is Canada facing a big squeeze? and The US eagle could soar again – and believes the UK is on a knife edge and could go either way.

Recent analysis might suggest that the UK has broadly escaped the worst of the higher education catastrophe brought about by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The UK has seen higher than normal domestic numbers, partly thanks to the A-level results debacle, strong international applications and, in most cases, universities reporting at least half of international students on campus.

But there is a nagging feeling that disaster could be just around the corner with Brexit looming, an upswing in coronavirus cases and students being sent home early from university.

Everyone has signed up to the government target of 600,000 international students by 2030 without commenting that it represents a yearly growth rate of just over 2% on the 2017-18 figure of 458,000.

There is nothing in that target to scare the Canadians, who have seen over 14% compound growth, or the Australians, who have seen over 13% compound growth between 2015 and 2018.

But it also doesn’t address the challenge of a resurgent United States, where a recent poll by the Graduate Management Admission Council saw a quarter of international candidates (24%) indicate that they were more likely to pursue graduate management education in the US if Joe Biden was elected president.

Fees and visas

Achieving the 600,000 will be made more challenging by the imposition of international fees for European Union students following Brexit.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, says reinstating post-study work visas had an instant and significant role in the growth of international student applications from South Asia, but these measures are easily replicated by competitors and may not lead to continued growth.

It’s also likely that the much-heralded ‘Graduate Route’ will be a paper tiger, with little prospect of making good on the opportunity of post-study work in a post-Brexit, recession-hit UK. If international students graduating this summer cannot find graduate level work in the UK, they will be all too willing to broadcast their dissatisfaction on social media, to friends and relations back home.

The employability advice gap

Other measures put in place to support international student employability, by organisations such as the British Council, are often just UK careers content rebadged with little thought to customisation for an international student audience. They rarely address the fact that international students are more likely to work back home than engage in post-study work in the UK.

With China’s cumulative growth for 2020 back in positive territory and many other Asian economies recovering, this is a gap in advice that needs serious attention.

It is paradoxical that the much-maligned Education Secretary Gavin Williamson was pointing the way to a much more important factor and potential solution over a year ago.

Writing to the Office for Students (OfS) in September 2019, he said: “It is critical that international students receive a world-class experience and should be supported into employment, in their home country or the UK. It will be critical that OfS makes public transparent data on the outcomes achieved by international students, including those studying outside the UK, as it does for domestic students.”

In their reply to the minister and the wider sector, the Office for Students claimed that this kind of data collection and benchmarking was not possible but, in fact, work has already been produced by the University of Warwick in conjunction with the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS), analysing the employability outcomes of UK-educated Chinese and Hong Kong students graduating in 2015-16.

Analysis of the international sample from the Higher Education Statistics Agency’s (HESA’s) new iteration ‘Graduate Outcomes’ should provide similar insights.

If the sample is not robust enough to perform meaningful analysis, then HESA’s methodology could be greatly improved. There are organisations, of which Asia Careers Group is one, that have collected longitudinal, robust, representative international graduate outcomes data for more than five years. Taking advantage of new technology and investing in new techniques would bring immediate results in demonstrating the return on investment of a UK degree.

Focus on outputs

The ‘fork in the road’ that faces the UK should not be a difficult decision for government, sector bodies and individual institutions to take.

The smart money is on refocusing investment on outputs, as demonstrated by successful international graduate outcomes, to the same extent as resources have been poured into inputs, namely international student recruitment activity.

Making the right choice is urgent and important because the clock is ticking and there are only six months to prepare students graduating in 2021 for the world of work – either in their home country or in the UK.

The UK should call upon the spirit and aspiration that saw international student numbers rise from 216,565 to 428,225 from 2000 to 2010. It was a respectable yearly growth rate, averaging 7%, that puts the current government target to shame, but it reflected a period when, as Hillman points out, the UK was innovating, aggressive and hungry for success.

A first step would be recognising that students are now looking at the return on investment of their overseas degree when choosing their country of study and institution.

Next would be a joined-up approach that takes the best lessons from Australia and Canada in ensuring that government policy and investment are aligned with a sector that acts collaboratively to emphasise the UK’s quality.

Add to that the untapped potential of the UK’s lead in transnational education as a route to building networks for soft power and creating employment opportunities in Asia and you have the making of a powerful campaign.

It’s a new approach, but as Winston Churchill said: “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.”

Louise Nicol is director of the Asia Careers Group.