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In an interview with Channel 4 on A level results day, skills minister Jacqui Smith welcomed a “flat level of overseas students” at undergraduate level, with Labour’s change in tone set to hopefully be “heard across the world.”

It was put to her that postgraduate recruitment was the area in clear decline from its 2022 and 2023 highs – she proposed a wait-and-see approach:

I think we need to wait and see because the postgraduate numbers for international students come later on down the track.

Now, it has been clear since last autumn that 2024 would be less of a bumper year for PGT recruitment, and there have been a series of data releases in the meantime to back that up, not least total July study visa application numbers being 15 per cent down on last year.

A cynic might say that Labour is picking up the baton from the previous government in making international student policy comfortably after the fact; an optimist would assess that Labour is well aware of the facts on the ground and making plans for the medium term, and remarks to the media are less indicative of the government’s thinking than they used to be.

It’s certainly true that the fact of UCAS data for 2024–25 appearing at more or less the same point of the summer as HESA student data for 2022–23 highlighted the lack of timely information on PGT compared to UG, at a moment of particular importance for institutions’ balance sheets. In the absence of prompt sector-owned data we’ve been scouring Home Office releases and Office for National Statistics net migration figures much more than used to be the case – it’s a time-lagged data landscape that has also allowed companies like Enroly to get regular coverage in the national press with their own slice of the market.

What the data shows

Today sees the release of quarterly Home Office statistics covering April to June of this year. It’s unusual this time in that we’ve already had monthly application figures for April to July, so the broad strokes were known in advance.

Year-on-year figures to June are particularly unhelpful in understanding the annual cycle, but will likely pick up press coverage. So at the top line we can see 13 per cent fewer study visa grants to June 2024 compared to June 2023 – but note that the majority of these issuances apply to summer 2023. Also likely drawing attention is the fact that (again, year-on-year to June) Pakistan has now overtaken Nigeria as the third country for study visa grants. Given the exchange rate freefall suffered by the Naira, this should come as little surprise – courses which are paid for in GBP have more than doubled in price in a year for Nigerian students.

What we do get in this release is data about course level and nationality. This allows us to dig a big further into PGT prospects for the coming year, with once again the massive caveat that July to September are – by far – the key months in the data, and we don’t have those yet at this more granular level.

And what we see is that, for this latest quarter at least, it’s a more than 30 per cent fall in grants of entry clearance visas for postgraduate taught students that’s driving the decline – though both PGR and UG are down too.

We can also see this fall in specific recruiting countries, such as India:

Here I’ve put the data for the first six months of the year together, as the best proxy for assessing the impact of the PGT dependant ban on recruitment (if that’s what Labour is waiting to see about).

Nigeria is through the floor:

And PGT visas for China are also markedly down, though in this case UG has, proportionally, fallen slightly more:

The fairly low aggregate numbers here should also reinforce the fact that the summer recruitment window is the key one. But the roughly 20 per cent fall in visa grants to Chinese PGTs does somewhat bely the hypothesis that this fall is being driven solely by the dependant ban, a measure which is seen as affecting far fewer prospective Chinese students.

And it likewise doesn’t seem to have dampened down demand from Pakistan:

Labour and the lag

There are all kinds of factors at play in the complex business of international recruitment, from the activity of competitor countries, to the practice of agents on the ground, to domestic labour markets and exchange rates. It’s hard to say exactly what part of the fall is due to restrictions on dependants – perhaps that is why the Conservative Home Office never released its modelling.

But taken as a whole it will shock no-one if I say we have more clear evidence that international PGT numbers for 2024–25 will be noticeably lower than the last couple of years. And I will conclude with my familiar warning that, for the Home Office (no matter who is in power) the key comparison is with five years ago, not one:

In the year ending June 2024, there were 432,225 sponsored study visas granted to main applicants, 13% fewer than in the year ending June 2023 but 61% higher than 2019.

Equally, even if this mostly relates to activity last year, Graduate route visa issuances are still rising in the data, given that there is a lag in how falls in international student recruitment have a knock-on effect here:

A total of 147,051 Graduate route extensions were granted to main applicants in the year ending June 2024, 49% higher than in the year ending June 2023 (98,396).

Taken in the round and considering political pressures, it feels hard to see Labour looking at the statistics when they are all in and coming to the conclusion that it needs to stimulate international student recruitment again. But if not that, to keep institutions solvent, then what?