A former education secretary has joined forces with vice-chancellors to warn that limiting international students to the UK’s “elite” universities only could torpedo the Westminster government’s levelling-up agenda.
Downing Street and the Home Office have both recently hinted at introducing new limits on study visas, in an attempt to bring net migration down. One idea that has been floated is limiting the right to recruit overseas learners to “elite” institutions.
But in a letter to education secretary Gillian Keegan, her predecessor Justine Greening warns that restricting international enrolment to a “self-selecting subset of universities” risks “widening the levelling-up gap in the higher education sector, undermining all the work on access, participation and employability that is crucial to improving social mobility and equality of opportunity”. The levelling-up agenda seeks to spread economic prosperity beyond London and the south-east of England.
