How many overseas students are there?

With more-than-usual amounts of chatter around UK HE policy at the moment, its useful to remind ourselves about evidence and actuality. With this in mind, I’m presenting two views of UK HE and its reliance upon students from other countries.

The chart below shows this – it’s drawn from HESA data, and shows the headcount of students – all levels, all modes – from outside the UK. This includes other EU and EEA countries, and students from all other countries.  It’s about domicile recorded for fees purposes, which practitioners will know is not a simple correlation with passport.

The data show that there’s a wild and fluctuating market, with sharp declines and even sharper rises. It must be a nightmare for universities in such a market – no wonder the emphasis given to recruitment activities.

Let’s look at a different chart. Again, students from outside the UK. The data here tell a different story – a stable market (you might even say strong and stable). Universities can concentrate on what that do best – teaching and supporting students learning; and conducting research. Our global partnerships look safe and secure.

It’s the same data of course. The trickery is in the Y axis (the horizontal one) – in the first chart the scale is truncated to start at 415k students; in the second chart the scale starts at 0.  The first gives the detail, the second the big picture. The chicanery is that the eye is tempted to focus on the line not the numbers. The conclusions drawn from the two charts are quite different.

There’s two lessons in this.

Firstly, don’t be fooled by bad charts. Darrell Huff’s How to lie with statistics is essential reading for everyone, in my view.

Secondly, the details does matter. Although total numbers are stable, the total is made up of the totals at all of the UK’s universities and HEIs – there’s almost 200 components to this, and maintaining, or growing, your numbers make the difference between adding jobs and giving a better student experience, or retrenchment, retraction and job losses.

So, look at the detail; remember the bigger picture might say something different; and try not to mistake wood for tees, and vice versa!

Plagiary

The Times today reports on a ‘crisis’ in universities, with high levels of student cheating, disproportionately committed by overseas students. The Times story is here, behind a paywall – I’m loathe to give Mr Murdoch any money, so I’ll summarise from other media sources.

From The Times, 2 January 2016

It seems that the Times surveyed UK universities and found that nearly 50,000 had been ‘caught cheating’ over the past three years, with 362 being expelled. In a subset of 70 universities- presumably those which collated data via fee status – overseas students accounted for 35% of cheating cases, but made up only 12% of the student population.

Thanks to The Guardian for their summary of the Times story.

The story focuses on plagiarism – with Geoffrey Alderman asserting that ‘type 1’ plagiarism (copying someone else’s words) is declining, with ‘type 2’ plagiarism (paying someone else to write your coursework for you) is on the increase. No data are given to support this, but anecdotally it feels plausible.

It is an interesting issue. To understand it better you’d need to discuss the nature of plagiarism detection (much more sophisticated than it used to be) and issues around the nature of assessment, and what it is meant to demonstrate. One thing which I’ve noticed across in dealing with student tissues in a number of different UK universities is that expectations of higher education, and of the role in examinations of independent thought, vary across education systems. In some systems, memorising and repeating back the words of authorities – your professor, books and journals – seems to be considered good. So students who copy may, at first, think that they’re doing the right thing. This seems to me to be an educational issue more than a moral one.

Notice also the emphasis on overseas students cheating disproportionately. Multiplying out the proportions, some 32,500 home and EU students were caught cheating over three years, compared to 17,500 overseas students. Yes, it’s disproportionate. I’d be interested to see how many of these were ‘first offence’ plagiarism as opposed to repeat offences (or indeed other sorts of exam cheating.) If you factor in the cultural/educational differences it doesn’t seem like a crisis or a moral panic. But are we meant to understand that overseas students are somehow lowering standards? If so, it’s all grist to Theresa May’s immigration mill. And very unpleasant bread it makes, as well.

I don’t expect we’ve heard the last of this – I’ll be reading ministerial speeches closely to see whether a ‘cheating foreigner’ theme begins to emerge.

Going private …

The BBC today reported what sounded a little like outrage at the news that University of Central Lancashire is offering a medical degree to overseas students only. The timing plays right into the ‘b****y foreigners coming over here getting our jobs/benefits/houses’ narrative which, unfortunately in my view, seems to have become part of the UK’s political culture. It’s worth looking in detail at what’s going on.

UCLan make the point – fairly – that they don’t have permission to recruit home students – student numbers in Medicine and Dentistry remain capped. See, for instance, this note by HEFCE explaining its role and the caps which apply at England’s medical schools. (nb that there are similar controls in the other UK nations). The devil is in the joint funding by HEFCE and the NHS.

Within the NHS there’s an element of funding – called Service Increment for Teaching (SIFT) – which covers the costs of clinical placements for medical students. These are the costs of having consultants supervise groups of trainee doctors (firms on rotations, if you want the jargon) and are allocated by the relevant medical school to the hospitals and GPs who offer clinical placements.

HEFCE and the NHS see the value in having some overseas students, and so the placement cap includes capped places for overseas students – at about 7.5% of the total cohort. This means that on funded medial programmes, there’s absolutely no crowding out of home students – medical schools simply cannot trade off home for overseas. Look again at the HEFCE note and see the number controls.

UCLan has therefore, in all likelihood, come to a separate deal with the hospitals and GP surgeries where its overseas medical students will undertake their clinical practice. The fee levels quoted suggests that UCLan won’t be making much of a financial surplus on this programme. And for the NHS trusts it gives them a little more income in what will be challenging financial times.

So the anger is misplaced. UCLan aren’t taking away chances from homes students. And if we need more UK doctors, the answer is for the government to fund them.

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.

An export business

With about a month to go until the start of the new academic year universities are busy with admissions and preparations for enrolment. Nothing new about that. But its worth looking at who is being admitted.

source: HESA, my calculations

The chart shows two things.

The columns, in blue, represent the total number of students enrolled in universities in a given year. The numbers reflect real people, not full-time equivalents, so this is the number of actual people enrolled. They also include all levels - undergraduate, postgraduate taught and research.

The line, in orange, represents the proportion of students whose domicile is outside the UK - that is, from any other EU country or from anywhere in the rest of the world. (A technical note for Theresa may, James Brokenshire and others - domicile is not identical to nationality; there will be a small number of people who count as domiciled outside the UK who have UK citizenship - its very complicated...)

(A second technical note for data geeks - the rest of you can skip over this one. HESA changed population definitions and from 2007-08 did not include writing-up and sabbatical students within the overall student numbers, recording them separately without domiciliary data. The proportion of of non-UK students is calculated on the basic HESA data; the total number of students is the raw HESA data plus the writing up/sabbatical data. The difference is negligible, but best to be clear.)

So the overall picture is one of a growth - and its too soon to see definitively whether there's a peak in 2010-11 or a temporary trough in 2012-13 and 2013-14. But the growing proportion of non-UK domiciled students adds to the picture: here's another chart, with one fewer significant axis:

source: HESA, my calculations

The blue is UK domiciled student numbers, the orange is students from the rest of the world. (Data geeks: I've assumed the split for writing-up students mirrors the split for PG students generally and calculated on this basis.)

This seems to me to show that UK student numbers in 2013-14 are pretty much where they were in 2002-03 (actually about eight thousand fewer). The number of UK domicile students hasn't been static over the period - there were nearly 1/4 million more in 09-10 than in 13-14), but the overall growth between 02-03 and 13-14 is driven by non-UK students.

This really does go to show that higher education is an export business. Universities UK regularly seeks to explain - to government and to the public - that universities are a major export industry. And with good reason - without overseas students in particular, many UK universities would be in financial difficulty. It would be a good idea - economically speaking - for the government to discount overseas students from its migration figures, and ease up on visa restrictions.

The Groves of Academe

The world of higher education owes a lot to ancient Greece – the very term academic derives from the name of the place where Plato taught.  And the continuing saga around Greece’s economic and political travails look like a path to exit from the Euro and possibly the EU. If this happened, what would be the impact on UK HE?

First, some numbers: non-UK EU students account for just over 5% of the UK total student population (about 125k out of just shy of 2.3m in 2013-14, according to HESA).  Greece contributes the fourth highest number – just over 10.5k, about 8% of the non-UK EU students in the UK.

Data from HESA

The other top domiciles are Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, and Cyprus, which tells me that in Greece, Ireland and Cyprus going to the UK is a significant cultural pattern (think of the different populations of those countries.)

A decent number of these students are undergraduates.  Greece in 2013-14 had the third highest number of new undergraduates – just over 5000.  As EU citizens, undergraduates are eligible for student loans form the SLC in the same way as UK students, and this enables the continuation of what has been a pattern of EU students studying in the UK for their first degrees.

Data from HESA again

The same countries form the top 6 – again showing that there’s quite a habit of studying in the UK in Greece, Ireland and Cyprus.

So what would Greek EU exit mean?  Hypothetically, of course.

Without access to SLC funding, it’s unlikely that as many Greek students would travel to the UK to study. 5000 new undergraduates is the intake of a large university, so the impact would be felt over the years as fewer students applied to UK universities.

And there’d be immediate questions to address.  The politics make this interesting.  There aren’t any rules or procedures for a country leaving the EU, and my guess is that the politics of such a change would be disorderly and dramatic rather than with a planned transition.  So, just for a change, there wouldn’t be clear policy from the UK government.

And universities are bound by rules and regulations on this. See, for example, the University of Exeter, which has a very clear policy on fee status for EU accession candidates. If a country stopped being a member of the EU, then the natural consequence is that the students from that country would become, in terms of fee status, overseas. Universities can choose to set whatever fees they like, and so could continue to charge the home fee for such students, but since students would become ineligible for state funding, current Greek students would in any case face immediate financial uncertainty and pressure.

Visa status is a further uncertainty. Would Greek students need tier 4 visas? It would be tricky for the current government to be relaxed about this. My understanding is that the direction of UKVI policy is that overseas students who need a visa extension would be required to leave the UK to apply for the extension.  So overall my guess is that Greek students would need tier 4 visas; and would be asked to leave the UK in order to apply for such visas from outside. What chance that many would do this and come back?

This is obviously speculation – Greece hasn’t (yet) left the Euro and the EU, and maybe they won’t. But it might be worth universities checking how many students they have from Greece – if there’s a student support and a financial policy question coming, knowing the scale of it in advance might be wise.

Risky business

It’s horror show time again as immigration controls on international students, and alleged fraud in some components of the student visa system, hit the headlines: here’s the Times’ Higher’s take on the statement by the Immigration Minister yesterday, and here’s the BBC’s.

There’ll be acres of newsprint (and amps of webpages? what’s the digital equivalent of ‘acres of newsprint’?) on the details of the story, and I’m not going to try to compete in this blog post. But I do want to pose a hypothetical ‘what-if’ question. What if overseas students stopped coming to the UK? Specifically, what would happen to university finances?

Well, obviously, there’d be no overseas fee income. And this amounted to over £3.5 billion in 2012-13. That’s no small beer. But equally, there’d be no costs associated with teaching those students, so it isn’t as simple as taking £3.5 billion off universities’ income.

The TRAC data give us a way to estimate the underlying effect. According to HEFCE’s latest TRAC figures, non-publicly funded teaching in 2012-13 brought in an income of £3.281 billion and the full economic cost of delivering that teaching was £2.466 billion. This means that the teaching cost about 75% of the income; or, conversely, that about 25% of the income was a direct contribution to institutional surpluses.

Of course that’s a sector average, and the detail will inevitably vary across individual institutions, but it’s not bad as a first estimate. I used this proportion to model what would have happened to 2012-13 university surpluses if there’s been no overseas students, no overseas fees, and no costs to teach those students. (That is, I took the 2012-13 reported surplus for each institution, and subtracted from it 25% of the overseas fee income for that institution).

The chart shows the results. The vertical axis is the number of institutions in surplus or in deficit; the left hand bar shows the actual 2012-13 data; the right hand bar shows the modelled data without overseas fees or costs.

So as things stand, 19 out of 161 institutions which report to HESA had a deficit in 2012-13. If there hadn’t been overseas fees and costs, 63 out of 161 would have shown a deficit. The net total surplus in 2012-13, across all institutions, was just over £1,083 million. Without the contribution from overseas fees it would have been just under £206 million.

Now, as Patsy the horse said to King Arthur, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when they had just seen Camelot, “it’s only a model” (link opens in You Tube). The real world would not be like this, and there’s lots of reasons why the estimate I’ve made wouldn’t be specifically right. And the likelihood of all overseas recruitment simply stopping is very low indeed, I would say. But the model reinforces a hard truth.

And that hard truth is that uncertainty about overseas student recruitment is a very real and quantifiable risk for UK universities. A financial risk but also, let’s be clear, a risk to the reputation of the sector and the experience of student and staff in the universities. The presence of overseas students broadens UK students’ horizons, by enabling them to learn alongside people from other cultures and backgrounds; and universities are more interesting and cosmopolitan places because of overseas students. Long may it continue.

Let’s hope that the specific issues raised by James Brokenshire and the BBC Panorama programme are resolved. And let’s also hope that the politics of immigration, and the politics of the coalition government and electoral cycle, don’t conspire to damage a really important feature of UK higher education.