Universities fear bankruptcy from foreign student ban

UNIVERSITIES have defended their reliance on foreign students amid warnings that a Government crackdown could lead to institutions going bust.

With foreign students accounting for 17 per cent or £7.4 billion of their entire income, university chiefs warned any moves to restrict them to higher performing universities would be an “act of economic self-harm”.

Prof Brian Bell, the Government’s chief migration adviser, also said moves to bar foreigners from lower-ranked universities or courses could deprive them of vital income, force them into bankruptcy and undermine the Government’s levelling-up agenda.

His comments follow suggestions by Rishi Sunak’s spokesman that “all options” are being considered to reduce net migration from its record post-war high of 504,000 including restricting the number of dependents and curbing foreign students on “low-quality” degrees. Official data analysed by The Daily Telegraph showed foreign students accounted for more than 30 per cent of the undergraduates at least 12 major universities.

Prof Bell said universities had expanded places offered to international students largely because domestic student fees had been frozen. The higher fees paid by overseas undergraduates and postgraduates cross-subsidised the losses on home students.

“You have to be very careful what you do,” he warned. “It could send more universities over the edge ... are you going to massively increase the fees that UK students pay to offset the losses?”

Asked if it could bankrupt universities, Prof Bell said: “Yeah. If you close down the international route, I am not sure how the university continues to survive.” He warned it could undermine the levelling up agenda by disproportionately affecting universities outside the South East. “If you focus on elite universities, then London, Oxford and Cambridge all do very well but what about Newcastles, the North West and Scotland,” he asked.

Last night, Rishi Sunak was warned that rising migration is “unacceptable and unsustainable” and the “unelected” Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) must not be allowed to “dictate policy”. In a letter to the Prime Minister, a group of 36 Tory MPS and peers from the Common Sense Group claimed OBR predictions of growth calculated from net migration figures are “built on a grossly unsustainable assumption”. They said immigration cuts GDP through stagnant wages, stalled productivity and underinvestment in domestic skills.