Not just the tall poppies

I blogged last week on the growing proportion of students in the UK who come from overseas, and its clear that the success of the UK higher education sector is built on global foundations. I thought it might be useful to look at the picture for individual universities.

Source: HESA data, 2013-14, calculations my own

The chart shows two things.

The blue columns represent the total number of overseas (ie non EU) students at each university, rank ordered from smallest to largest. The data is from the most recent HESA publication (2013-14) and is headcount, not fte. The largest is Manchester, the next is UCL; the axis on the left gives the scale.

The black dots are not dirt on your screen, but represent the proportion of students at each university who are from overseas. The right hand axis gives the scale; the highest proportion is the London Business School; the second highest is LSE.

What does this show? It shows that there are plenty of universities and colleges with relatively small numbers of overseas students who nevertheless are pretty dependent upon them. Take away (or reduce) overseas student numbers and you have an effect upon the whole HE sector.

Just saying.