Why are international students abandoning Sheffield Hallam?

Morning readers — and welcome to today’s Tribune.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a slightly nail-biting time to work at Sheffield Hallam. Last December, as the university offered voluntary redundancy to all 1,700 of its academic staff, we published our most popular story ever about its financial troubles. Since then, the situation has only grown worse, with the university announcing in May that 400 non-academic staff would have to go. 

According to the university, it needs to slash a fifth off its staffing costs as it prepares for a drop in enrollments from international students, following controversial shifts in government policy. “The government’s actions to reduce the overall number of international students in the UK — despite the many economic and cultural benefits they bring — is making the financial picture for universities much worse," a Hallam spokesperson told the BBC. Presumably, the university’s leadership will be crossing its fingers for a Labour government, which might reverse these changes and lure these students back. But, according to some experts, doing so might help one problem by making another worse. 

Editor’s note: Normally our second story of the week is paywalled partway down, but this week we’re flipping it round, and paywalling our Saturday piece. That’s going to be about the other Sheffield Hallam: Britain’s weirdest constituency. On paper it’s a classic Tory seat, but in reality it's the only Labour/Lib-Dem marginal in the country. We’ll be asking what matters to its voters — and which way might it go this time? Upgrade or get a free 7-day trial to give that one a read.

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🏗️ Plans for the fifth and final stage of Park Hill flats have been unveiled by developer Urban Splash. The block nearest Talbot Street will have 105 flats along with 210 square metres of commercial space and car and cycle parking. Urban Splash started the project in 2008, and originally promised 200 of the planned 870 flats would be for social rent. However, while the first phase did include some social housing, phases two, four, and five have contained none.

⚖️ Premiering at DocFest on Thursday is Britain’s Forgotten Prisoners, a documentary about prisoners serving indeterminate “imprisonment for public protection” (IPP) sentences. Introduced in 2003 by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett, the sentences have led to some prisoners serving whole-life terms for relatively minor offences. This piece about the film in the Guardian says the former Sheffield MP “looks tortured when he talks about the monster he created”.

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💼 On Friday, SADACCA on the Wicker hosts the opening party for Migration Matters 2024, nine days of events celebrating the the positive impact that migration and refugees have had on Sheffield and beyond. Headliners this year are Grammy-nominated Afrobeat duo Amadou & Mariam, genre-hopping band Sirens of Lesbos, and prize-winning poet Roger Robinson. To see the full programme of comedy, conversation, art, theatre, film and more, click here.

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⚽ In case you hadn’t noticed, England start their campaign for European glory this Sunday at 8pm against Serbia. Fans in Sheffield have loads of options this year, including a 4,000 capacity Fan City including bars, food and family-friendly activities on Devonshire Green. However, if you'd prefer something more low-key, the Cambridge Street Collective food hall, The Leadmill and The Pearl at Park Hill will also be showing all the England games live.

“If you walk past a shop window swinging a baseball bat for a couple of weeks, it doesn’t matter if you never hit it,” Mark Bennett, director of audience and insight at FindAUniversity tells me, “the people inside will still get worried.” In this analogy, the people inside the shop are prospective international students weighing up whether to pay the exorbitant fees required to get a degree in the UK, and the person swinging a baseball bat is the Home Office. To universities reliant on income from these students, it’s not only the policies the government actually introduces that could hurt their bottom line. Even just the threat of future policy changes creates “a massive amount of uncertainty,” Bennett explains, “and uncertainty for students is a big problem.” 

I’ve come to FindAUniversity, based in a Grade II-listed former cutlery works near the Moor Market, to better understand the size of the existential threat facing Sheffield Hallam — and why a recent dip in the international market for UK degrees seems to have hit it so much harder than the city’s other university. The company, founded by two University of Sheffield graduates in 2001, offers prospective students a number of online directories listing postgraduate courses worldwide: FindAMasters, FindAPHD, and so on. They are, their website promises, the “experts in everything postgraduate” and “market leaders” in the unusual industry of matchmaking students and universities. Around 70% of the 1.3 million visits to their various sites each month are from prospective students based outside of the UK.

In the last year, following a controversial change in government policy, huge numbers of these hopeful scholars appear to have decided that a postgraduate degree from the UK is simply not worth the price. Last summer, the government announced that, from January onwards, the vast majority of international masters students would no longer be able to bring their dependents with them. Whether they had children or elderly relatives to care for, they would have to leave them at home. If he were to be uncharitable to the current government, which he feels “has been inclined to be slightly anti-immigration,” Bennett would argue that this is simply the route into the UK that is easiest to close. “It’s easier to change student visas than to stop the boats.”

Prior to this change, half of the international visitors to FindAUniversity’s various sites searched for courses in the UK. In the aftermath, this dropped to just a quarter. “That audience very quickly pivoted away.” The change specifically affected students on postgraduate taught courses; those on research-based courses, such as PhD students, are still able to bring loved-ones with them. Looking at the most recent data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, for the 2021/22 academic year, it’s easy to see why the effect at Hallam would be more pronounced. That year, there were 10,960 international students studying at the University of Sheffield, but only 5,115 of them were on a postgraduate taught course. Sheffield Hallam, meanwhile, had just 5,205 students from abroad, of which 4,265 were studying this kind of course.

If anywhere near half of those students chose not to apply to Hallam, as the search data from FindAUniversity could suggest, then the university would be in serious trouble. International students, despite making up a tiny percentage of the student body, are a key source of income. Fees for UK — or “domestic” — students are capped; by contrast, the only limit on fees for international students is what they are realistically willing to pay. As a result, a postgraduate degree in Health and Social Care at Hallam costs £4,712 a year for a UK student — and £16,385 for those coming from abroad. This is why, Bennett adds, it’s particularly annoying to hear people suggest international students are “pushing out” prospective candidates from the UK. “It’s nonsense,” he tells me. “What they are actually doing is probably making it possible to teach those students. In some cases, it means a university can cover the cost of providing a subject.” 

Since FindAUniversity’s directories are free to use, the company makes the bulk of its income from universities paying to advertise on their sites. At one point, Bennett tells me that every UK university that offers postgraduate degrees currently pays for this privilege. (Cambridge, the last hold-out, finally relented several years ago.) It’s little surprise, then, that he is unwilling to risk annoying either of the city’s universities — which are not only FindAUniversity’s customers, he says, but its “neighbours and friends” — by commenting on the specifics of their current situations. 

What he will say is that “the bottom dropping out of” international enrollment “would be catastrophic” for some universities, particularly those that aren’t in the Russell Group. He also explains why the recent change in government policy — and the fear that there could be more restrictions coming down the line — has had a bigger impact on Hallam’s ability to attract students from abroad than it has for the University of Sheffield. For example, the ability to bring dependents is particularly important to prospective students from certain countries, such as Nigeria, because these students tend to be older and to have already started a family. On average, for every Nigerian student that comes to the UK, there are three dependents coming with them. (The ratio for Indian students, another significant cohort at Hallam, is 1:1.)

The latest figures from HESA show that anything that puts Nigerian students off studying in the UK, like having to leave their children at home or the recent collapse of the Nigerian currency, is going to be far more devastating for Hallam than the city’s other institution. In the 2021/22 academic year, there were just 135 Nigerian students attending the University of Sheffield, compared to 1,415 studying at Hallam. The University of Sheffield, meanwhile, is far more popular among international students from China; in fact it is the second largest recruiter of Chinese students in the UK. In general, these students tend to be far younger and thus less likely to have dependents they want to bring with them. (Around a third of Chinese students at the university in 2021/22 were studying on an undergraduate course.)

Chinese students are also far less likely to be put off by concerns that the Home Office might introduce further policies, such as scrapping the “graduate route” visa, which allows students to live and work in the UK for two years post-study. While the Home Office has never publicly discussed axing the visa, Home Secretary James Cleverly did call for a review to see whether it was being “abused,” which suggested a real threat to its continued existence. (In mid-May, the committee tasked with conducting this review announced there was no widespread evidence that abuse was taking place, and recommended that it should stay.)

For some international students, Bennett explains, the ability to stay in the UK for a couple of years after graduating was a huge incentive to study here — and even the suggestion that the Home Office might try to stop them in future is enough to put them off. “We can’t be too self-congratulatory,” he suggests, about the result of the review. “The fact we’ve not got rid of it now is only worth so much to them.” 

In general, the post-study visa is most appealing to students from countries with weaker economies, fewer high-paying jobs and where the British pound is stronger than the local currency. Chinese students, by comparison, don’t tend to be that keen to stay, since the economy back home is “generally very buoyant, with lots of good jobs available”. The huge drop in search queries for UK courses on FindAUniversity’s sites, Bennett notes, was mostly due to a decline from people in South Asia and Africa. “We’ve not seen large drops on our platform for East Asia.” As a result, income from the international cohort at the University of Sheffield is far more resilient in the face of recent changes.

Looking back at a graph of Nigerian enrollment at both universities up to the 2021/22 academic year, however, also reveals something far more interesting: Hallam’s immense popularity with Nigerian students is actually a recent development. For a number of years pre-Covid, both universities attracted roughly the same, relatively low, number of Nigerian students. During Covid, however, the Nigerian student body at Hallam started to far outstrip that of the University of Sheffield. Intriguingly, this period also marks a dramatic increase in the total number of non-UK students studying at Hallam, which more than doubled between the 2019/20 and 2021/22 academic years. 

According to Hallam’s most recently published annual report, this trend continued into the next academic year. The report crows that the university “welcomed [its] largest intake of international students” in 2022/23. Income from these students’ fees had grown by £10 million (an increase of 159%) since 2019, “following successful recruitment rounds in September 2022 and January 2023”. 

It’s a little surprising, given the dramatic job losses now necessary due to an anticipated dip in international students, to find that the growth of this income stream is a relatively new development at Hallam. But according to Jim Dickinson, associate editor at higher education site Wonkhe, this is par for the course. 

The annual fee for undergraduate students from the UK, who make up the bulk of the student body at every institution, has been frozen since 2016, which means it has decreased in real terms due to inflation. Dickinson suggests that “the first year that started to manifest” in financial consequences for university budgets was 2019/20, which happened to be the same year that the country went into an unprecedented lockdown. “There was furlough money and universities didn’t have to put the lights on, so it was actually a good year,” he says. 

After that, universities needed a new way to prop up their budgets, which is exactly when Hallam’s international student body started to balloon in size. Universities began “filling their boots with money from international post-graduates,” Dickinson says, and the sector has now “become dependent on the money” to make up for losses elsewhere. Over the same period that income from international fees blossomed at Hallam, income from full-time UK student fees fell by £10.3 million.

For universities that were not, unlike the University of Sheffield, already popular with international students, the sudden goldrush would have arguably been impossible without the introduction of the graduate route visa in 2021. It was created to replace the post-study work visa, scrapped in 2012 by Theresa May during her time as Home Secretary, and was something the UK’s universities “had been calling for for a long time to improve the UK’s competitiveness,” Dickinson says. At the time, the government said it hoped to see the number of international students in UK higher education rise to 600,000 a year by 2030. It’s a target that has already been hit, more than half a decade early.

In Dickinson’s view, the government simply failed to anticipate how popular the new visa would make the UK’s universities on the global stage and didn’t respond quickly enough when it became clear demand was eclipsing their expectations. “In most cases, nobody really thought about whether there was going to be anywhere for those international students to live,” he argues, or whether local schools and GPs could accommodate them and their dependents. Universities, meanwhile, were so desperate for the extra income that they were incentivised to recruit more and more students, regardless of whether there was sufficient capacity. “Individual universities don’t want to admit it’s a problem,” he claims, “because they’re trying to sell themselves on the global stage.”

Certainly, on Hallam’s website, pages aimed at incoming international students repeatedly emphasise that those coming with dependents, who are not guaranteed student accommodation, may struggle to find somewhere to rent privately. “Family accommodation close to the campus, or to schools, is limited and is likely to be more expensive,” one page reads. “We have received excellent feedback from international students who chose to live in Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley and Chesterfield and we strongly encourage you to consider these locations.” Another page lists how long it would take prospective students to commute into Sheffield from other UK cities, a list that includes Leicester and Birmingham, both over an hour away. 

Dickinson is keen to stress that he “leans to the left” and is very much in favour of international students being able to study in this country. But, if Labour is elected next month and reverses the clamp-down on dependents, then he insists there will need to be frank discussions, at both local and national level, about how to support the needs of this resulting influx of new, temporary citizens. “Sometimes when I don’t finish those sentences, I sound like Nigel Farage,” he says. “I don’t have any problem at all with large numbers of international students, as long as we are not lying to them and we have put in the infrastructure so they can have a decent life.”

When he talks about students being “lied to,” he means about how expensive it will be for them to live in the UK. The group he most suspects of deliberately misleading them is the vast network of international agents universities use to recruit in other countries. The list of agencies used by Sheffield Hallam, for example, covers more than 80 countries and includes 26 agencies for the country of Nigeria alone. These agents are paid commission for every student they enrol, Dickinson points out, which gives them an obvious financial incentive to lure students to the UK, even if they clearly cannot afford to live comfortably there. “I have got a million anecdotal stories from students, who tell me about all sorts of terrible things their agent has said and done and lied about.”

Despite his fear of sounding like Farage, his biggest concern about the way UK universities have grown to depend on international students is that it is morally dubious. “Is the right way to fund UK higher education on the backs of the family debt and wealth of people from the global south?” he asks. “Is it the right thing to do to sell students these enormously expensive courses and get them to prop up the UK’s higher education?” However, while he suspects the bubble of international students would have eventually burst even without the government’s intervention, he’s also painfully aware that no one seems to have any better ideas about how to fund universities. “What someone should do is sort out the sector’s finances, but that’s easy for me to say. I’m not the finance director for Sheffield Hallam, I’m not trying to make the Excel sheet add up.”

As for how much trouble Hallam is in, it will be hard to know for sure until more recent data on enrollment is released by HESA. Certainly, Hallam itself is unlikely to admit it’s in trouble, for fear of scaring off even more potential students, until it becomes undeniable. “It’s difficult to know what’s going on behind closed doors,” Dickinson says, “but there are really significant numbers of redundancies being announced.” Hallam’s size will at least make it less vulnerable than smaller universities but, across the UK, very few institutions are not under any kind of pressure. The only ones without some kind of freeze on recruitment, at least in a few departments, are Oxbridge and Imperial. “I’m not in the rooms at Hallam,” Dickinsons says, “but it will not be pretty.”