Twice this week I have been involved in significant discussions over the UK's attitudes to international students. One of these was with the Vice-Chancellors and Deputy Vice-Chancellors of other Yorkshire universities when we lunched with a significant VIP, and the other was with colleagues from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Indeed, the subject is one that comes up in some form or other almost every day.
The education of international students at UK universities represents a massive British export - by some reckonings either the second or third most important such source of international earnings. International students provide a massive boost to the UK economy, and to the economy of the cities and regions where they study. We in Sheffield (both universities along with Sheffield College) showed the significance of that contribution in a major piece of research we commissioned from economic consultants two years ago. The presence of international students on campuses in the UK provides vital opportunities for inter-cultural mixing and the development of skills among UK students to enable them to work in multinational settings - vital since too many UK students lack the fluency in other tongues and thus need to develop their cultural competences in other ways. International students who have enjoyed a great education and widened their own abilities and experience through studying in the UK constitute a major addition to the UK's 'soft power' of individuals well-disposed to the UK for the future.
All this is well-attested. The Treasury knows it; the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills knows it; local authorities (such as the mayors and chief executives of Britain's cities) know it; local politicians know it. Pretty well everyone with powers of analysis knows it. In a period when the economic growth agenda is of profound importance nationally and locally, the recruitment of international students represents a vital component for development and for the creation of employment. To universities themselves, fees from international students are an important component of a mixed portfolio of income streams.
Yet the Home Office progressively - almost every week - brings in further hurdles to the UK's attraction for international students. Alone amongst intelligent organisations and interest groups it operates to make the UK appear unwelcoming, to create bureaucratic systems to complicate the processes of visa application, to cancel existing arrangements for English language testing in a huge swathe of cities across the globe, to implement arrival registration procedures that almost seem designed to buckle under pressure, and to require students to leave the country before the ink on their degree certificates is dry (or even before they have had their degrees conferred in some cases). The Home Office single-handedly seems determined to thwart the reaping of all those advantages that the recruitment of international students can bring to the UK.
Why? All I can presume is that the Home Office sees a populist anti-immigrant agenda as more important than all the agendas of national and local economic growth, of employment creation, of intercultural mixing, and of the development of the UK's soft power that I spelled out earlier. Perhaps there is a sign in the entrance to the Home Office that reads "Adopt a Little Englander mentality all those who enter here", a paraphrase of Dante's "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate" ('Abandon hope all ye who enter here' - over the gate of Inferno).
