From 36,000 to 12,000: Tracking the Decline in EU Students Post-Brexit with Paul Wakeling

You're listening to the world of higher education podcast. Season three, episode 12.
Alex Usher: Hi there, everyone. It's 4am here in a very dimly lit hotel room in Jakarta, and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.
Eight and a half years ago the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Among many, many other consequences, that meant the UK voted to change the status of tens of thousands of European students from domestic to International, with all the financial consequences that entailed. You see within the European Union, all students, regardless of where they are from are considered domestic and receive all the privileges of domestic students.
In the UK, that meant students could pay tuition fees and access student assistance the way British students did. That is, no money up front and a very long debt repayment period. And as for students coming in through the famous Erasmus program, well, they could pay whatever they would normally pay to their home institutions. Sometimes that meant free.
So Brexit was, in many respects, one of the greatest financial experiments ever conducted in global higher education. What happens to demand when you take all that subsidy away and ask students to pay full freight instead?
With me today is Paul Wakeling, Professor of Education at the University of York in England. He and a group of colleagues have been working to understand the mobility effects of Brexit. Not just whether fewer European students attended UK universities, but which students came, and where they went. I heard him present on this issue recently at a conference in Luxembourg, and I knew there was a story here that we had to cover on the podcast.
The results aren't especially counterintuitive or anything, but it's always good to have the full rundown on the damage that policy of deliberate self harm can inflict on a country's higher education system. And with that, let's hear from Paul.
Paul the paper that you and your colleagues wrote, it deals with the mobility of EU students to the UK, both pre and post Brexit. So, what did mobility look like post Brexit? Was there a lot of inflow from EU countries? How big was the size of the inflow?
Paul Wakeling: Yeah, so we'd seen really 20 years of continuous expansion of students coming in to the UK from European Union countries. So I guess partly prompted by an expansion of the EU at the beginning of that period, but continuing with a fairly steady growth trajectory ending up with about 36, 000 students in the year before Brexit proper. So , approximately doubling over that period. And that was at a time of growth of international students more generally, EU students representing, I think about a third of all of the international students that came to the UK from across the world. And I think the UK being one of the most, if not the most popular destinations internally within the EU for European students.
Alex Usher: And of course, within the EU, there is a scheme called the Erasmus program, and it's been around, I think, since 1989 or around there. That must have been, and if I, correct me if I'm wrong, but in effect under Erasmus, you're paying fees to your home university. So, so in a sense, they, these are students who wouldn't have had to pay very much. So what was the role of Erasmus in shaping student mobility prior to Brexit?
Paul Wakeling: Yeah, so there's two separate things here, really, then Alex, so you've got four degree mobility between European member states where each there's a kind of reciprocal arrangement. So a European student going to another member state is treated as if they are a domestic student in that state. So for example that would mean a student coming from France to the UK — to England specifically — would be paying fees at the same rate as a, an English student. A French student going to Scotland would have been paying nothing because there were no tuition fees in Scotland.
The Erasmus scheme is slightly different. So that's partial degree mobility, and that was a funded scheme with zero fees for the students to go and do part of their degree in another country. And interestingly, the UK was a big net importer. British students quite reluctant to go and study abroad. And many of the ones that did go for Erasmus schemes were already on programs, which would have expected you to study abroad, a kind of language placement year.
So I guess the UK was, depending on how you look at it, I mean, financially a net loser from that scheme. I guess academically a net gainer because we we brought in many interesting students. And I taught some great Erasmus students on my degrees. So yeah, that reciprocal full degree arrangement was really interesting. And even then though uh, You know, UK degrees are more expensive than somebody who's in a country where there are no tuition fees, like Swedish students in Sweden.
Alex Usher: And would, so they're not getting money from that student for tuition. Were they counted as domestic students for the purpose of government funding?
Paul Wakeling: No, not really. So Erasmus students work on a slightly different basis. So it was a kind of funded as a self contained scheme, whereas students who were coming in for full degree mobility were essentially treated as if they were home students. So, some time in the past, I think we're talking about more 10, 15 years ago now, there were student number controls in the UK.
So there was a set number of places. And EU students would count the same as UK students against those those targets. When that was taken away then they just became part of the student loan book. For the for the British Exchequer. And then in Scotland, they continued with student number controls because there were no tuition fees. So yes, EU students did count against the against the targets. And there was a bit of tension there because that meant there was a different situation in England and Scotland. And I remember seeing some discussion of whether Scottish, Domestic students were being replaced by or displaced by wealthy students from the European Union. So disadvantaged Scottish students may be not able to get a place because they were being kind of edged out, which wasn't the case in England.
Alex Usher: So June, 2016 you know, the kingdom votes for Brexit. How did that, and of course it takes three years, right? It's till 2019, if I'm not mistaken, or
Paul Wakeling: It's 2020 by the time we left, yeah.
Alex Usher: 2020. So there's actually, there's almost a four year period of phase into this. What was the policy change that came about as a result of Brexit? And, you know, to what extent did institutions have any kind of freedom to decide for themselves what the policy would be? Like, was it, were there choices made at the institutional level or was it was a solution imposed from above by the British government?
Paul Wakeling: So, if you think about the eligibility of incoming European students, that shifted. overnight, essentially in January 2020. So students who were entering UK universities in 2020 went from being domestic students to international students overnight. And that meant that any eligibility for UK state funding was taken away entirely. So what that meant in very concrete terms is if you were going to Scotland, you went from paying nothing, to paying the international student fee, which in many cases is about 20, 000 pounds. I think that's probably about 23, 000 US dollars. And in England you went from paying, from being able to borrow an income contingent repayment loan for 9, 000 pounds to having to pay upfront fees of about 20, 000 pounds. So a real significant impact overnight.
UK universities are not public, they're not public, they're private corporations that are publicly funded. It's a strange arrangement. And that means that technically they can do what they like. So they could have decided to continue charging lower tuition fees to EU students. And there was some evidence of some discounts schemes coming in, which we might pick up a bit later. But they wouldn't be able to get state funding for those students. So that was the principal change that happened at that time.
Alex Usher: So it seems to me that this is actually quite a lot like what happened in Finland and in Sweden in the decade prior to Brexit both those countries went from zero fees for international students. And international here means non EU, so it's sort of the inverse of what's happening in, in, in Brexit. But you know, they, they at least had, they had very sharp drops followed by slow rises. Right. I mean, I think I'm characterizing that right. Was this well understood in the UK? Like when people sort of spent that three or four years between 2016 and 2020, did they say, well, we know this is what's going to happen to our student numbers. Did they start estimating what the loss would be?
Paul Wakeling: No, not really. And I guess we all expected that to be a significant difference. But it was essentially, left at that. And I think this is one of the things we found strange when we came to write this paper is that here's this cataclysmic change that's really under researched, understudied. It was very much a sort of newspaper approach. Oh, the numbers have gone down a lot, let's move on to the next story. So, yeah, so I think it's quite surprising how, how little specific planning there was, how we might adjust to the expected losses. Partly, I guess, out of expectation, perhaps that we would offset those changes from from other countries, because at this point, there was significant growth happening. And in fact Brexit was swiftly followed by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which bizarrely led to this uptick in international enrollment. So I remember in my own department, we essentially doubled our international intake in that year. Which took us all by surprise and caused a considerable headache. Cause we were talking about going from 300 to 600 students overnight.
Alex Usher: We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back.
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Alex Usher: And we're back. So Paul let's, let's turn to the actual paper here. What did you find? What were the big changes? Were there some EU countries where the numbers held up better than others? And were there some UK institutions where the numbers held up better than others?
Paul Wakeling: Yeah. So, I think that the headline that's no surprise to anybody was there was a huge drop in EU enrollments in the year following Brexit. So we went from about 36, 000 students to about 12, 000 students from one year to the next. So really significant hit right across the board, all institutions affected and significant reductions from every EU country, except one in in taken to the UK. And the exception was the Republic of Ireland where there's a different arrangement between the Republic of Ireland and the UK, and that predates really the European Union. So there's a reciprocal agreement for all sorts of things. You don't need a passport to go between the two countries. You can vote and work in the two countries if you're resident there. So very easy to move between. And the two countries treat each other's students as if they were domestic students. So, a long tradition of migration from Ireland, from from the Republic of Ireland into UK universities, really not much flow back the other way, even from the North of Ireland. So that was unaffected. In fact, went up a little bit from everywhere else. Yeah, we see really significant reductions.
Alex Usher: Was it across the board or is it one of these situations where the, you know, the prestige universities, the Russell Group universities held their numbers better than the post 92 universities, the newer universities?
Paul Wakeling: So we see a shift in the institutional representation for EU students before and after Brexit. And it's a really quite sharp one. In the period before Brexit there was growth and it was concentrated mainly among what we would call modern universities. So that's the the kind of local universities that many of which were formerly polytechnics in the UK, been very successful at attracting UK students often in specific subject areas and their numbers really dropped exceptionally sharply. So as a sector those institutions were really strongly hit. Conversely your listeners will, I'm sure have heard of the Russell Group of universities, which includes places like Oxford, Cambridge and LSE and my own university, York. It's a self selecting club of the most prestigious universities in the UK, according to the Russell Group. And those institutions were the least affected. So again, they did take a significant hit.
Alex Usher: Least affected might still mean
Paul Wakeling: It's, yes,
Alex Usher: numbers, big drops,
Paul Wakeling: it still makes a significant hit but not quite as, as big as for the other institutions. So you get that sectoral shift such that the Russell Group goes from being the least likely destination for EU students to the most across, before and after Brexit. And that's because not that the Russell Group increased, it's because the others decreased so much more. But within that individually, universities, some did okay, some, one or two, actually maintained their numbers. Others took really dramatic either proportional or absolute hits in terms of student numbers. And that wasn't simply a read off from the sector that you're in, it varied a bit between institutions as well.
Alex Usher: So where are these students going now? Like who's picked up the slack? If any, I mean, everyone always talks about this, right? Like, where are they going? So did they come to Canada? Did they go to Australia? Did they stop learning in English or did, what happened? Do we have any sense of that?
Paul Wakeling: So I think that's a really interesting question and it's one I can't I can't answer with data. I think we can speculate so I'm, I guess there were some students that will have just stayed home because there might have been something attractive about either the UK as a specific destination or the terms on which they could study in the UK as EU students that wouldn't have allowed them to go to Canada or the US or Australia or indeed another country.
I think colleagues have suggested that one of the attractive things about the UK is the English as a medium of instruction. And of course, other European countries offer that. But have also been pulling back a little bit from that. So in, in Denmark and the Netherlands, for example, there's been a push to teach in, the national language out of a concern that there were too many international students coming in and it's disrupting the local system.
I think something we noticed in particular was that there was a significant group of students from the south and east of Europe. So, countries which are less economically advantaged within the EU into courses, Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal Greece, to some extent into business related courses in the UK. And I think it might be difficult for those students to go to other business schools, which teach in English within the EU, because they're often quite elite, expensive kinds of schools. So I'm thinking of the schools in France and Spain, for example, that teach in English. They're not going to be cheap. And they're often outside of the the national system. And so they don't fall into the EU's, the EU reciprocal arrangements, for example.
Alex Usher: So, well, I imagine you can tell with data a little bit better how institutions have reacted. Where have they gone? I assume they didn't take this loss of students lying down — they're going to look for international students elsewhere. The usual suspects are always India and China. Cause that's, you know, two thirds of the market outside the EU really. Where else, where any new countries coming or are up and coming?
Paul Wakeling: So, China China has been a kind of a staple for UK international recruitment for a long time. India has kind of waxed and waned a bit and tends to, some institutions do very well with India and some subjects, others less so, but that was another emphasis. I think there's been quite a bit of attention on West Africa. And we saw, in particular from Nigeria and Ghana, which of course have historic links with the UK and use of the English language. We saw some upticks from there too, but then recently I think there's been a crisis in in local currencies and that seems to have fallen away again, along with policies within the UK which have targeted students bringing in dependents and that's had a particular effect on the Nigerian market.
The other thing that institutions tried to do rather than take this lying down was to introduce different discount schemes. So we did, in preparing the analysis for the paper, we did have a look at some of these schemes to see what was offered and it's a highly varied offer. So different sorts of scholarships or fee reductions aimed at EU students, not really much consistency to it. And then we don't have data to say whether they worked or not, but we do see that they pretty much disappear in the second year after Brexit, which suggests that institutions didn't think—
Alex Usher: Suggest the institutions didn't think they worked. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's interesting. So what, I mean, what's the, is there a broader impact here? I mean, one thing that strikes me, of course, you know, I think the BBC published something earlier this week saying three quarters of institutions were in deficit this year and international students, loss of international students is to blame. But I think what you're telling me is the EU students wouldn't necessarily have changed that, right? Because as you said, sometimes you're teaching them at a loss. So what is the broader lesson here? What is the broader impact of this policy on the UK higher education system? Is it just about prestige and global competitiveness is you talked about the quality of students that you could get, right? That maybe that's where the real hit is. What do you think the impact was?
Paul Wakeling: So I think pedagogically I mean, I think I have really noticed in my own classes, in the past we would have not large numbers of EU students, but perhaps in a class which was mainly sort of, of one or two nationalities previously, so, often, usually British and Chinese, just three or four EU students would make a huge difference because it suddenly opens up the conversation, brings in really interesting people who've made a decision to do something a bit different to everybody else. And you know, that's been a great thing to to include. And I teach education, there's lots of different education systems in Europe. So you've got different examples to draw on. So, that will have been the case right across a whole set of disciplines, I'm absolutely certain. In terms of the UK soft power I mean, we're often talking in this country, in fact, there's a report about every year about how many world leaders were trained, or educated rather, in the UK. And that's going to go down as a result of this policy, I'm sure. It's even been said that there were a million Erasmus babies. So, um,
Alex Usher: Yeah,
Yeah. I've
Paul Wakeling: yeah, Yeah.
And so people have met their their significant other while studying abroad and then had children. And so there's going to be a lot less British and other nationality couples. But I think more instrumentally, I guess, when Brexit happened I was, a bit phlegmatic about it because I thought, well, if the numbers drop by half and the fees go up by 100 percent, I mean, it kind of offsets, right? But of course that hasn't happened. So I think as part of that broader picture, it's been important in the kind of downturn. It's another place you can't turn to to sort of think about diversifying a student intake. So I think that's been a problem. Is it the catalyst for the financial problems we see? No, not on its own.
Alex Usher: Yeah. So, if you'd'd been a vice chancellor of your university or another university in the UK during this period what would you have done? I mean, based on the, on what you know now, were there ways that institutions could have mitigated this a little bit more? Like how would you have handled the challenge, the enrollment and financial challenges such as whatever they were?
Paul Wakeling: Yeah, so once I picked myself up off the floor and stopped crying I, I think that, I think well, discounting was an obvious thing to try. Clearly didn't work. I guess a more radical approach would have involved much more collaboration, and that would have been thinking about how can we put together bilateral agreements to think about, okay, where are we getting our students from? How can we maintain, for example, that flow of students from Romania into the UK? Around 5, 000 students a year were coming at the end of that period, which translates over a three year degree into 15, 000 students. That's a lot of people. I think the reason that didn't happen is because the effort taken to do it would probably not quite offset the gain you'd get because I think you'd still lose people just because of the absolute numbers that we're talking here. And that's the difference with the Finnish and Swedish change. You know, so when they introduce fees, they're not huge fees to go to to Finland or Sweden. And you're already living in a high cost country, so it's a marginal increase for the student. Whereas here we're talking about suddenly you've got to find another 20, 000 pounds per year. So that's 60, 000 pounds if you're an undergraduate. So it's pretty hard to mitigate that, I think, for some of those poorer country students.
Alex Usher: Paul Wakelin, thank you so much for joining us today.
Paul Wakeling: Thank you.
Alex Usher: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and of course you, our listener for joining in. If you have any questions about the podcast or suggestions for future ones, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube page. Never miss episode of the World of Higher Education.
Join us next week when our guest will be again, Gerard Postiglione from the University of Hong Kong. He's going to be joining us to talk about a new form of higher education institution. They're called vocational universities, and there are very interesting development. Bye for now.