In rising to speak to Amendments 63 and 64 in my name, I draw attention to my interests in the register as a visiting professor at King’s College London, chairman of Access Creative College and chairman international of ApplyBoard.
I am not sure we are capturing exactly what we need to in this section of the Bill on overseas funding. If we are to legislate afresh, as we seem to be doing, on freedom of speech in higher education, the chilling effects arising from the excessive concentration of international research and tuition income surely need to be part of the discussion. The four categories of relevant overseas funding in Clause 9 are all good as far as they go, but they manage to exclude altogether the largest single source of such income. That is, of course, the income that universities receive from the uncapped and unregulated tuition fees charged to international students.
Like so many in this place, I strongly support the contribution that international students make to the success of our higher education system, and I am very pleased indeed that we met the Government’s target of 600,000 international students in this country by 2021, 10 years ahead of the 2030 target. There are many critics of international students in the country today. I note only that the proportion international students represent in the overall student population has not changed markedly since 2014. While the actual number has increased by 28% since that time, that has been matched by a similar growth in the UK student population, meaning that their proportion of the mix has stayed broadly the same.
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What has changed, particularly since our departure from the EU, is the composition of this international student body. Concentrations of international students from particular countries are intensifying quite rapidly. Efforts to diversify are generally making feeble progress. Recent research by Janet Ilieva of Education Insight for Universities UK International highlighted this clearly. Her research pointed to an increase in the number of UK higher education institutions recruiting more than half of their undergraduate students from just one country, and at postgraduate level the number of higher education institutions recruiting more than half of their PG students from one country has increased over the past three years from 42% to 50%.
A full quarter of international students in the UK are from China. It is reasonable for policymakers to ask whether this is perhaps too much of a good thing, at least for some institutions. Dependency on China for international students varies markedly across the UK system, driven by the strong preference of Chinese students for prestigious and highly ranked institutions. China accounts for 51% of all non-EU students at the 24 universities of the Russell group—10 times more than the next country, India, which accounts for just 5% of such students. The Russell group has made a clear business decision to focus its international student recruitment on a group that yields the most revenue per place. That is because average tuition spend is almost £20,000 for a Chinese student, whereas it is £11,000 for a student from Nigeria and an average of £10,800 for a student from India. Six of our Russell group universities—a quarter of them—had more than 5,000 students from China in the last academic year, and one big institution currently has more than 11,000 Chinese students, roughly a quarter of its total student body of 44,000.
The problem is that excessive concentrations of students from particular countries within certain institutions can create financial dependencies that may limit freedom of speech and result in academic self-censorship. This issue pertains to China now, especially within the Russell group, but it could easily be about other countries exercising inappropriate influence and instrumentalised student flows in the future. We are living through torrid geopolitical times, and views may vary as to how likely some form of disorderly disengagement in our relations with China is and over
what timeframe, but we should assign some probability to a severe disruption to student flows and research partnerships.
To my mind, the Office for Students is late on to this from the perspective of institutional and systemic financial sustainability, and I also believe that UKRI is late on to it in terms of assessing the impact on our capabilities in key fields, including telecommunications and applied materials, where a significant portion of our most impactful research is undertaken in collaboration with Chinese partners. That is why I would welcome a broader definition of overseas funding than is currently in the Bill and why I believe it would be sensible to add a duty on the Office for Students to consider whether a registered higher education provider is overly reliant on income from a single country of origin. I beg to move.