Double-digit growth in international student enrolments following the end of Covid travel restrictions led to multimillion-pound windfalls for many of the UK’s research-intensive universities, latest accounts show.
With British universities also able to charge higher tuition fees to students from the European Union for the first time in 2021-22, many Russell Group universities registered unprecedented rises in their annual income from overseas students – with the University of Southampton almost doubling its income from international students to £170 million in a single year, and King’s College London growing its international tuition fee income by £95 million since 2020-21.
The extraordinary growth was not, however, replicated across the entire 24-strong group of research-intensive institutions, with enrolments either flat or slightly down at some northern institutions, including the universities of Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield.
Some of the most dramatic rises in overseas student income came in London, where UCL saw its take from full-time international students rise from £440.8 million to £512.5 million – an increase of £71.7 million, or 16 per cent. That was slightly offset by a £20 million fall in income from “domestic” students in 2021-22, after EU learners were removed from this group and began to pay the same fees as students from outside the bloc.
