Inbound student mobility to the UK is on course to decline for the first time since before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Challenges including changes to migration policy and increasing costs of UK study will mark the end of the post-Covid boom in international student mobility, a new British Council report has found.
Growth in issuance of UK study visas dropped to nearly zero by the third quarter of 2023, researchers found. This is after international enrolments previously surpassed pre-pandemic levels in all four major English-speaking host destination countries: UK, the United States, Australia and Canada.
The UK is at the leading edge of this trend. Issuance of UK study visas returned to pre-pandemic levels by the third quarter of 2021, earlier than any other major host destination country.
