Don’t expect U-turn on overseas students’ dependants – MAC chair

Sector leaders have warned UK universities to not expect U-turns on restrictions on international students, despite calls from providers to help ease off financial woes.

Brian Bell, professor in economics at King’s College London, and chair of the government’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), said that rules around restrictions on international students’ dependents were unlikely to be loosened “under any circumstances”. 

Speaking at the annual conference of the Chartered Association of Business Schools, he said: “The government is committed to reducing net migration. The worst thing they could do from that perspective would be to suddenly allow dependents to come again because the numbers will just soar, so that’s not going to happen.”

Professor Bell’s comments come after a report by CABS revealed that more than four in five business school respondents directly linked falling recruitment and visa restrictions, with many calling for the policy to be eased to help aid the sector’s financial crisis. 

However, Professor Bell claimed that the previous policy – which allowed international master’s students’ dependents to work in the UK for three years – was “phenomenally generous”. The number of international students’ dependents in the UK rose from 14,839 in the year ending September 2019, to 152,980 by September 2023. 

“There is no government around that can talk seriously about controlling migration and have that sort of increase,” Professor Bell said.

The MAC released a highly anticipated report earlier this year which found no evidence of widespread abuse of the UK’s graduate route despite criticisms from Conservative politicians, and recommended that it be maintained. 

But Professor Bell warned that universities could start “playing around with the system” to get around visa restrictions. 

“I worry that some universities will start redefining their one-year master’s programmes to a research programme, so that they are allowed to [bring their dependants], and the government will come down like a ton of bricks if it sees any evidence of that”.

Roderick Watkins, vice-chancellor at Anglia Ruskin University, said the government’s comments that it will not reform the graduate route were an “important signal to the market” but warned that market conditions could lead the UK to introduce similar restrictions on international recruitment to those seen in Australia and Canada. 

“The risk for us is that the drivers which led to that policymaking in Australia and Canada are going to be in the UK, and we are always 18 months behind Australia,” he said.

“There’s a Labor government there, there’s a Labour government here. I’m not at all sure that we’re yet putting in place our arguments to defend ourselves from that same policy direction in 12 or 18 months’ time.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com