UK universities and supportive voices in government are seeing moves to improve official migration figures as a chance to ease intense political pressure around international student recruitment brought by the Conservative drive to reduce net migration.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has launched a consultation on the future of population and migration statistics in England and Wales, having already outlined “various ways to estimate the contribution of different patterns of migration to the population, including possible ways of isolating estimates of international students from other types of migrants”.
Removing students from net migration figures has been advocated by Universities UK (UUK) in the past and remains the aim for some in the sector.
However, any such move would raise political challenges around the public credibility of an altered net migration count, as well as challenges for the ONS in departing from the United Nations definition of a long-term migrant, which includes students.
