Month: May 2024

MAC Review with No Chips at Graduate Route

No doubt at all that the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) Rapid Review of the Graduate Route and its recommendation of “retaining the Graduate route in its current form” is good news for the UK higher education sector.  But amid the sound of high-fiving and back slapping from universities and sector bodies a close read of the Review still leaves scope for Government mischief making.  It should also be remembered that MAC’s recommendations of 2018 on a “more restrictive post-study work route” of 6 months for Master’s students was largely ignored. 

Political antennae will be twitching at the sound of Robert Jenrick’s post that “if you order white paint, you get a whitewash” and MAC has left a few open goals if James Cleverly chooses to score with his party’s right wing.  There’s an open invitation to leverage the sector “to support the government’s desired labour market objectives for the route” which could mean manipulation of Student visas as well as Graduate Route visas. He will also have his eyes on the year-on-year visa announcement of Immigration System statistics on 23 May as he considers the next steps.

Sticking to the Exam Question

The Review chose to largely confine itself narrowly to the question about the Graduate Route and declined to take the bait on some associated issues.  In doing so, however, it may have offered a road map for the Home Secretary to thank it for its work, accept the plaudits around the dependent visa reductions and then pursue a new quarry – the student visa.  He can diminish recruitment at source while celebrating that the Government’s introduction of the graduate route was correct.

The quoted objectives of the Graduate Route are so benign and wooly that it is difficult to know what to make of them:

  • “Enhance the offer to international students..ensure the UK remains internationally competitive”
  • “Retention of talent..enabling employers to recruit skilled graduates…contribut to the UK economy”
  • “Increase the number of international students in higher education…increase the value of education exports”

Of course, the Graduate Route achieves those aims because almost any competitive post-study work offering would.  What MAC notes in several passages is that changes to the student visa (such as dependent visas) are where the action is.  Yet on page 32 they are keen specify “we did not examine distinct abuse of the Student route and note that the government did not ask us to do so.” There seems to be a decent signpost for Cleverly if he chooses to follow it.

There May Be Trouble Ahead

If one was looking for trouble and reading between the lines, one can see where the Minister may choose to take guidance from the Report.  Specifically, there may be ways of managing Student route visas to give preference to high-ranking universities (however defined), supporting specific geographical locations, penalising institutions recruiting students who seek asylum and controlling the role of agents.   

  • MAC declined to engage in any assessment of whether the route secured the “brightest and the best” but nodded to the High Potential Individual visa use of league table rankings in its provider groupings while noting that “international postgraduates from lower globally ranked universities are more likely to go on to the Graduate route.”  Explicitly it says, “If the government’s aim is to retain bright international students… and by this they mean those who attend universities ranked the highest globally, then this data suggests that the Graduate route may not be attracting the global talent defined in this way.”

Other areas for caution or limited support in reflecting the value of international students are where MAC:

  • indicated that the data suggests  “students may be moving to London for work after graduating from universities in other parts of the UK”.  In that respect there may be limited evidence for international graduates contributing to any levelling up agendas;
  • reflected the difficulty of determining numbers in employment but showed a 79% match rate for Graduate visa holders and HMRC records and 68% as PAYE employees.  They caution that neither is comparable to a “normal” employment calculation.  Some would argue that this leaves some 20-30% whose employment status is, at best, unknown. It was quickly seized upon by some Conservative party commentators;
  • suggested they are “likely [to] make a small positive net fiscal contribution” which would suggest this is not a key issue for government consideration despite the efforts of the sector to suggest otherwise;
  • noted the “recent reports of an increase in asylum applications” but indicating that is an issue the government should address directly if it is a concern.     

On direct abuse there is some damning with faint praise. Basically the Review notes that there are almost no rules to be abused (which could be seen as a sign of laxness) and limited data to track whether they are overstaying. Comments include:

  • “limited number of criteria a student needs to meet to apply”,  “few restrictions for what those on the route are allowed to do in the UK” and “beyond refusal rates, there are no quantitative data sources”
  • “little evidence available on the numbers who are overstaying their visa length. The Home Office was unable to provide data on the rate of overstaying on the Graduate route.”

The biggest issue related to the potential exploitation of international students by recruitment agents “when applying under the Student route”.  This is a departure from the rest of the Review because MAC decides to very explicitly link the selling of the Graduate Route as a lure for students joining the Student Route.  They claim that HE providers and student representatives at roundtables agreed “regulation would strengthen the ability to eliminate the exploitation of students by bad actors.” 

A more heavy-handed regulation, particularly as MAC included both agents and subagents in the discussion could make for interesting times for commercial operations associated with universities.  While MAC noted that 57% of HE providers (responding to a Home Office survey) used student recruitment agents this would be 100% for aggregators and pathways.  With the growth of direct recruitment relationships with pathways operators the ownership of any quality and oversight obligations is likely to come even more under scrutiny.

Steady As She Goes (For Now)

If the government wanted MAC to provide it with hard evidence to close the Graduate Route down the gambit has failed and the sector can breathe a sigh of relief.  Short of a blatant, politically motivated disregard for the advice given and the evidence base produced the best presentation is to take the applause for introducing the Route and ensuring a globally competitive sector.  The window of opportunity for the current government to act is rapidly closing and without a clear steer from MAC it is difficult to see what the political upside is to radically changing the Graduate Route.

MAC has also provided the government with what it will consider political good news, in saying that the ban on foreign students bringing dependents was having a far bigger impact than expected.  Anything that gives Sunak a “fighting chance” of reducing net migration levels below 2019 levels before the election is likely to be received with open arms.  It’s probably a stronger case than arguing about the growing dependency of universities on foreign students.

After all that it seems appropriate to thank Professor Brian Bell and his colleagues for a decent job done in very short order and apparently without bias towards past observations.  The Review has highlighted some other aspects of student recruitment that are less palatable and it would be good if the sector took that seriously.  Perhaps some universities could also consider this a warning to moderate their approach to enrolment growth.  

Image by Enoch111 from Pixabay

Beware the Ides of MAC

Aficionados of ancient Rome will know that every month had an Ides. For March, May, July and October it fell on the 15th of the month while for the rest of the year it was the 13th. The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) Review of the Graduate Route is due to report on the 14th of May so it seems possible the detail will become clearer the next day.1

Some predict a ritual and metaphorical assassination of the higher education sector to suit the political aims of the Conservative government. It is certainly likely to be a day when, just as in ancient Rome, debts become due. Will MAC deserve the line “Et tu Brutus” from the sector if it echoes, “I come to bury Caesar not to praise him”, in its thinking on the graduate route?

The announcement of the Review led to some frantic rearguard action from the higher education sector which was cut out of the usual, drawn-out Call for Evidence, at a point when the Government needs to reassert its credibility on immigration ahead of an election. There may be some glimmers of hope but the politics seem to be overwhelmingly negative. It comes when the sector is beset by other negative stories and some well-respected voices are suggesting it is time to accept there are problems that need dealing with.

Last Throw of the Dice

It is difficult to know whether the effort from Kaplan, HEPI and the NUS to produce “The Exchequer benefits and costs associated with the Graduate Route visa” in advance of MAC’s publication is going to help. The main argument seems to be that MAC would be remiss in not taking into account the tax return from increasing numbers of international students entering the workforce on the Graduate Route. At a single stroke the students resolve the sector’s funding issues and become a part of the solution to the UK’s debt problems.

We didn’t really need a long and technical paper to tell us that if people go into the workplace they pay tax and contribute to the Exchequer and that if you have more of them they pay more. What the paper doesn’t say is that a logical extension of this self-serving argument would be that if the period of post-study work was extended to five years or even indefinitely, international graduates would pay even more tax. It’s unspoken because, while more years of post study work would probably attract even more international students to UK universities, it would make the student visa look more like a route to residency which most agree is politically unacceptable.

One eye catching and unhelpful point about the report is that it estimates 21% of the Graduate Route visa holders are not in paid employment. That seems a big number and some might suggest that the number is even larger because those not in employment are less likely to respond to being asked their status. It will be interesting to see if MAC has got the linking of HMRC and visa records to give more insight.

A Government, of whatever political persuasion, is more likely to believe that if there are jobs to be filled the better answer is to deal with the UK’s long-term sickness issues.2 At a single stroke you reduce the cost of welfare, get the tax benefit of having more people in work and don’t have to pay the political price of relying on overseas workers. Both main parties know, from the sector’s own research, that the majority of the British public want the same or fewer international students.

Glimmers of Hope

Even if the Report doesn’t go a long way towards changing anybody’s mind there are other straws to cling to. Much has been made of the decline in student visas issued in the first quarter of 2024 being a strong signal for the Government not to “overcorrect” on the issue by taking further action. The Home Office deadpanned by saying that, “the full effect of recent policy changes and any other impacts” would not be known until the peak in applications in August and September.

The decline in dependent visas is a big headline number but commentators including Dave Amor have noted dependent visas are only back to 2021 levels and while main applicants are down “applications without dependents sounds like they are up.” There is also the impact of the decline in Nigeria’s currency driving some of the changes. For a Government under pressure from its own back-benches on immigration it seems unlikely the numbers are down enough.

In that respect, the timing of the MAC review is interesting in that Cleverly demanded a mid-May response without any clear or evident reason. It may be that he plans to take its recommendations and use them, either positively or negatively, for a publicity blitz around the release of the “Immigration system statistics, year ending March 2024” scheduled for 9.30am on 23 May, 2024. The platform provided by the first quarter figures, the MAC review, and then the yearly figures is a decent campaigning rhythm to reinforce his statement that “Over the coming months, we will continue to show the pace of our progress as we deliver the control the public rightly expect.” It may even be the first bit of positioning for a post-election leadership run.

Let’s Get Cynical

The politics of the matter seem simple and the defection of Tory MP Natalie Elphicke to Labour with the accusal, “It’s clear they [the Tory government] have failed to keep our borders secure and cannot be trusted” will only have hardened the lines. The imperative is to retake control of the immigration debate, challenge Labour’s position ahead of the general election and perhaps even reduce their flexibility if they form the next Government. The interests of the higher education sector do not even feature in that calculation.

The last Labour government has long been known for leaving the infamous note for the incoming Chancellor, “I’m afraid there is no money”. It haunted them in future elections and it is doubtful that the Conservatives will make the same mistake. Far better to hand Labour an impoverished sector and draw a distinctive line on post-study work rights that makes it even harder to patch over gaps in funding with international student fee revenue.

So, the Conservative’s would gain twice by limiting post-study work. The immediate gain is the impression of firm government, a populist stance on a divisive issue and a sop to the troublesome right wing of the party. In the longer term, presuming an election loss, it hands the incoming Government a significant and worsening university funding situation with limited room for maneuver without seeming soft on immigration.

Pathway Woes

Almost a sideshow for now are the other reviews set in motion when the Sunday Times set a hare running with its slightly ill-formed attack on international pathways. Universities UK leapt into action with a review by the Quality Assurance Agency that seems likely to report in June 2024 (if the link with the scope is correct). The Department of Education was instructed to “investigate allegations of bad practice by agents” although it’s a little difficult to find when any outcome is expected.

Pathway operators and by default universities could really do with the reviews not hampering the growth of International Year One programmes or requiring significant policing of agent activity. Times are tough enough already. Evidence of that came with the completion of reporting from INTO’s joint venture portfolio showing that INTO enrollments were still 23.6% down on 2018 for continuing joint venture businesses.

In a previous iteration of this graph in another blog and before reporting from INTO University of East Anglia, I had presumed that the joint venture would have made some progress in 2022/23. In reality there was a further collapse from 310 to 241 students year on year which puts it 62.8% down on 2018. The only bright spot was that the wholly owned Manchester operation hit record high numbers in the year.

Source: INTO Joint Venture Annual Reports

The success of INTO Manchester seems ironical given the probability that Navitas was favourite for the £150m Embedded International Study Center contract at Manchester Metropolitan University. Uncertainties around UK international student visas seem likely to have held up further progress at a point when Navitas must already have been smarting at losing the University of Leicester and University of Northampton as partners. Evidence of another pathway operator with some issues to resolve is Kaplan at the University of York.

Just for completeness, on what some consider the ‘big four’, are the problems at Study Group which were exacerbated by the Daily Mail singling them out in a front page splash as sponsoring 804 student who then claimed asylum. The Mail makes much of the “secret Home Office database” as the source of the story but at least as far back as March 2023 the UK Visas and Immigration Study Sector Brief was noting the trend. Any suggestion student visas are being subverted in order to secure a permanent place in the UK will be used as further evidence the sector is out of control.

Voices of (T)reason

In that context there was a small breath of fresh air from Professor Wendy Alexander at the recent International Higher Education Forum conference in May 2024. She is reported as urging the sector, “We really need to be a little more self-reflective about it. The first way to build trust is to concede there was a problem..”. In that respect she echoes a broader point made by ex-Sheffield Hallam vice chancellor, Professor Chris Husbands, who in July 2023 was suggesting the sector was in danger of “tacitly defending a system that it knows is not sustainable.”

Jo Johnson and Vivienne Stern have also been talking the language of avoiding “over-correction” and “serious overcorrection” which seems to be code for accepting that a correction was reasonable and maybe an acceptance that the sector has lost the argument for the status quo. Slightly off-topic but it was amusing to see Johnson suggesting that the Teaching Excellence Framework should be the guiding light for allowing universities to raise domestic fees. Of 228 universities in TEF 2023 only three were ranked as “requires improvement” overall (11 were requiring improvement on student experience and 9 on student outcomes). Basically, he meant all universities.

Tom Petty suggested that “the waiting is the hardest part” but there is good reason to think that the reality might become even tougher after May 14th. Even then, the sector’s problems aren’t all about international tuition fee revenue even though it has offered a sticking plaster for a few years. The old stock market dictum “sell in May then go away, don’t come back until St Leger’s Day” is a good idea for anyone considering UK universities or university pathway operators as a good bet. Come September some of the dust will have cleared and we may even be seeing the election warming up with policy statements on the future shape and size of higher education.

NOTES

  1. It doesn’t really matter if not. The headline just had to be written and justified.
  2. Both parties are focusing on the issue of the growth in long-term sickness and solutions are likely to form part of the election agenda. The Conservatives, not surprisingly, are calling it as ‘sick note culture’ while Labour has accepted that a problem exists and is “..threatening the future of the sustainability of our finances and the future of our public services”

Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay

Mind the Gap

There is much heat but precious little light around the scale of cutbacks and potential job losses in the UK higher education sector.  UCU has begun its own “live page of all the redundancies, restructures, reorganisations and closures” taking place in the sector.    It’s the source of the media’s drumbeat of 55 universities cutting back and part of the storyline of a gathering apocalypse for the sector.   What is interesting is how slippery and difficult it is to get any real sense of how employment in the sector1 has grown in recent years and the extent that any cutbacks might go deeper than that growth.

It is always wise to start this type of discussion with a recognition that every redundancy is a personal story and the anxiety involved is never to be underestimated.  But it’s equally wise to try and understand the reality of what is going on and why.  There is no doubt that many in the sector have experienced a windfall in international tuition fees since the Graduate Route was introduced and it’s reasonable to try and understand how they have spent the money.

It’s also worth understanding the extent to which the attrition in university finances, due to the declining real value of domestic tuition fees, since 2012 has changed staff numbers.  Previous blogs have considered the sabre rattling around job cuts, the cost of restructuring at some institutions and the reality that some universities (and some courses) might simply be finding it hard to recruit students.  In that respect many problems in the sector are localised and a one-size fits all solution of taxpayer funded handouts is unlikely to solve them. 

Source: Graph published Mark Corver, Founder and MD of DataHe, LinkedIn

Looking Into a Lacuna

The story from HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) indicates that Academic Staff numbers (excluding atypical) grew from 198,335 in 2014/15 to 217,065 (+9.4%) in 2018/19 and then to 240,420 in 2022/23 (a further 10.8%).  Non-academic staff grew from 205,500 in 2014/15 to 222,855 in 2018/19 (+8.4%) but then the trail for non-academic goes cold.  That’s because from 2019/20 “it became optional for providers in England and Northern Ireland to report data about staff on non-academic contracts.”

Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency

*Atypical contracts are “generally non-permanent contracts for short, one-off, or as-and-when tasks”  There were 62,690 atypical academic staff in 2022/23 (down from 75,560 in 2014/15)

NB: The number of institutions reporting in any given year may change.

For a sector that wants to proclaim its impact on the economy it seems a little odd to leave a big gap where half those employed are not fully accounted for.  Around a third of institutions declined to report in 2019/20 and the number declining to report had grown to 43%.  HESA suggest “caution” in interpreting the data which is little surprise since it has no insight into getting on for half the employers.

Even more disturbing is that HESA Q&As misleadingly suggest that their numbers include “all staff” when the data they point to is only academic staff.  GOV.UK is in on the act with the Official Statistics page for Higher education staff data UK:2021 to 2022 confidently linked to HESA data that only shows academic staff numbers.  Many have talked about the sector’s approach to transparency and this seems another example of paying lip service to letting its main funders know where there money is going.

You can tell how confused UniversitiesUK are from their Higher Education in numbers release of 15 February 2024, which claims that in 2021-22 “there were 233,930 staff (excluding atypical staff) employed at UK higher education institutions.”  The source they quote is HESA staff record 2020-21 – odd as they are giving numbers for 2021-22 – which only has a complete record for academic staff.  It seems particularly misleading because the last HESA data (in 2018/19) with both academic and non-academic staff showed a total of 439,955 employed.  It’s not like UUK to short-change themselves when making claims about the sector and I suspect it’s just a mistake.

Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency

NB: The snip cannot capture the whole table but all the data is available there.1

A WonkHE blog recently touched on the data gap caused by opting out in the context of technical staff but it seems arguable that the gaping and growing hole in information on non-academic staff borders on the absurd.  As with all these things each university has the data and generally publishes a version of it in their Annual Report so that is where one has to now start looking for the answer to the sector’s employment path in recent years.

Filling in the Dots

The data collected and considered below reflects a selection, hopefully a reasonable cross-section, of universities in the UCU list referred to in the opening paragraph.  It takes the average FTE of all staff as shown in each university’s annual report since 2017/18.  This shows that the number of staff employed rose modestly in the years before the pandemic, stalled during the pandemic years, and then rose more sharply from 2021 to 2023. 

On average across all 15 the growth has been 8.8% since 2021 but this masks three universities where numbers have fallen (with Kingston down 5% the largest fall).  Growth of 17.7%, 13.5% and 9.7% was seen at the universities of Teesside, Exeter and Central Lancashire respectively.

Average growth of the 12 non-Russell Group institutions has been 6.6% since 2021.  Over the longer term since 2018, Lincoln is up 24.1%, Teesside is up 23.6%, and UWE up 19.3%.  This puts into some perspective the UCE summary of the cuts:

  • Lincoln – “looking to make 220 redundancies” has added 403 FTE since 2018
  • Central Lancashire – “looking to cut 165 posts” has added 280 FTE since 2021
  • Teesside – looking to open a Voluntary Severance Scheme ‘to review how we deliver our business’ probably needs to review after adding 322 new roles (up 17.7%) in just two years since 2021.

For the three Russell Group universities in the group the overall outlook is skewed by Exeter which has increased FTE staff numbers every year since 2017/18.  Newcastle’s growth has been below the average of the 15 modelled and Cardiff were slightly above the average.  UCU tell us that Exeter has ‘opened a Voluntary Severance Scheme’ and that Newcastle ‘has a voluntary severance scheme across all faculties without targets or numbers.’  Cardiff is ‘planning to cut Ancient Languages’.

  

The overall employment data has not been disaggregated for Academic v Non-Academic but there is no doubt that in some institutions growth of administrative staff has significantly outpaced that on the academic side.  That is not a judgement on whether administrative jobs are more or less important than academic roles but the lack of insight on what is happening across the sector is one reason that the lack of HESA data is so infuriating.  The sector really lets itself down when it can’t even be bothered to say how it is adding to employment.

Solving the Right Problem

It is unclear whether the highly publicized cutbacks in the sector are doing much more than correcting course after adding staff to meet a short term windfall that is now likely to disappear.  In some cases, the correction appears to be significantly less than the growth in employment evident in recent years.  Again, this is not to minimize how difficult that can be for those concerned but one may have to ask whether senior management really thought the bonanza was sustainable when they started hiring.

As identified in another blog there also seem to be some universities that are in a state of almost perpetual crisis because of an inability to recruit domestic students and the short-term bonus of international students was gratefully grasped.  It also seems likely that some courses have deteriorated in popularity to an extent where the sector, the government or another body may need to determine how to sustain research and learning through combined action.  Fundamental questions around the value of universities to local economies and the preservation of some academic disciplines may be better placed in the context of levelling up and cultural heritage than graduate visas. 

NOTES

  1. Those who would point me to the 385,500 FTE claimed by London Economics in their August 2023 report for Universities UK might care to go and re-read the basis for it. In the methodology section London Economics confirm that only 217 of 303 institutions reported data to HESA in 2021/22. The London Economics estimate is based on the 20`18/19 ratio of academic to non-academic. May or may not be right and it would be better to have certainty and a decent time series.
  2. There is an argument that because the reporting of these numbers changed after 2018/19 the subsequent numbers do not compare like with like. That is true but all that reaffirms is that the record is inadequate. As we see above, London Economics seems content to use 2018/19 as a solid starting point. As more institutions decline to provide details on non-academic staff the gap between reality and return gets wider and even the post 2019/20 record gets sketchier.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay