Unrevised

Members present

Lord Krebs (Chairman)

Lord Dixon-Smith

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon

Baroness Manningham-Buller

Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan

Lord Peston

Earl of Selborne

Baroness Sharp of Guildford

Lord Wade of Chorlton

Lord Willis of Knaresborough

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Professor Robert Allison, Vice-Chancellor and President, Loughborough University, Professor Gina Rippon, Pro Vice-Chancellor for International Relations, Aston University, and Professor Colin Riordan, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cardiff, Chair of Universities UK’s International Policy Network and Chair of the UK Higher Education International Unit

Q32 The Chairman: I would like to welcome our second witness panel this morning. In a moment, I would like to invite you to introduce yourselves for the record. If you have any brief comments to make by way of an opening statement, please feel free to do so, but also please do keep any comments brief because we have quite a lot of questions to get through and we want to be able to tease out some of the issues with you. You are obviously aware that we are interested in hearing from you this morning, first, the facts, figures and trends in international student numbers in STEM in your institutions, as well as any comparative figures across the sector as a whole. Later on, we want to move on to consider whether any changes that you have observed are related to immigration policy. Finally, we want to look at the current Immigration Bill and the changes that have been proposed there. That is the shape of the discussion for the next hour or so. Perhaps I could now invite Professor Allison to lead off by introducing himself for the record.

Professor Allison: My Lords, good morning. Can I thank you for inviting me to present evidence to you today? I am Vice-Chancellor at Loughborough University. We have 16,500 to 17,000 students. Between 2,500 to 3,000 of those are from overseas: undergraduates, taught postgraduates and research postgraduates. Interestingly, we have a range, from some students who are only with us for about a fortnight to others who are with us for their full degree. We currently have one campus in the East Midlands where, interestingly, we both admit and graduate more students in engineering subjects sensu stricto than any other university in the country. We are also about to open a campus on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park site in London because of the opportunities that will afford us, particularly around overseas taught postgraduate students. In saying that as an introduction, you will sense that some of the issues that you are considering today are of particular interest to my university.

Professor Rippon: I am Gina Rippon. I am from Aston University. We are a relatively small university; we have just over 10,000 students. We have just over 100 undergraduate courses, and 44% of those are STEM courses. We have just over 60 postgraduate courses, and 45% of them are STEM courses, so we have quite an emphasis on STEM education. Just over 20% of our students are overseas students and 45% of the overseas undergraduates are STEM students. Some 15% of our overseas postgraduate taught students are STEM students, and about 46% of our overseas postgraduate research students are STEM, so we have a big emphasis on STEM at Aston. We also have a big emphasis on employability, and we have particular courses—pharmacy, optometry, biomedical sciences—where the requirement to complete a pre‑registration course has been significantly impacted.

Professor Riordan: My name is Colin Riordan. I am vice-chancellor of Cardiff University. I am here representing Universities UK. I am chair of the UK Higher Education International Unit. The university itself has 28,000 students. It is a comprehensive university with medicine, dentistry and a large range of allied health subjects including pharmacy, optometry, nursing, healthcare studies and a number of others. About 13% of that 28,000 total are international students. We have very wide‑ranging international interests, and, of course, almost the whole range of STEM subjects.

Q33 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. I would like to kick off by asking each of you to respond in turn to the question of whether there is evidence in your particular institution—Professor Riordan may like to comment more generally across the sector—of changes in numbers of overseas students in STEM coming to your institution or applying to come, and how that has changed over the past few years, both in numbers and in quality. Is it particular subjects? If there have been changes, are there particular countries of origin that have been affected? Perhaps, Professor Allison, you can start off with this.

Professor Allison: Actually, at Loughborough, in some subject areas and for some countries, it is good news. I will give you two examples of that. One is that we, as a university, have particularly strong links with Brunei. At the moment, we have more students at our university from that country than any other in the UK. The majority of them are studying STEM subjects, and for the full period of the degree. The majority of them are undergraduates. Another very good example of what I think is an excellent initiative nationally, and one that we have benefited from, is the Science Without Borders programme with Brazil that you may have heard of.

Knowing that I was going to be in front of you today, I met those students at Loughborough yesterday evening. We currently have 78 of them with us for a year on undergraduate programmes. We have a group of around 20 with us on taught postgraduate programmes, and three PhD students. They tell me that their arrival in the UK and the whole of their experience so far has been completely positive. I am delighted with that, because I am sure we would all want that to be both the reality and the perception of UK higher education in countries like that. There are some other countries where there is more of a challenge for us. One is India—and I suspect we are not unique there—where we have seen a notable decline. In fact, our overseas students from that country have dropped by almost 50% in the last couple of years.

Interestingly, although this is partly our own personal recruitment policy—I ought to make that clear—we have found that students who we have lost through that route tend to have been STEM students in engineering. We have picked them up by recruiting students from China, in terms of our total overseas student target. Those have predominantly been students in business and economics. The country has changed for us, and the degrees or subjects that those students are wishing to study tend to vary with us as well. My colleagues ought to comment about whether that is a similar trend for them. So some good news, but also some challenges for us.

The Chairman: What about the quality of students? Has there been any change?

Professor Allison: The quality, for us, has not suffered, whether they are home or EU students, or students from other parts of the world. We set standards that, for us, are really part of the benchmark of the institution. The challenge for some parts of the world, and of course you will appreciate this, is not necessarily their willingness and ability to learn, it is their understanding of the English language. We have found that in some countries that is a challenge for us. Also, in some areas, the challenge is actually to determine whether what they say they are capable of is actually truly what they are capable of. However, the academic standard per se for us has been a relative constant, because we have that as a really important part of our recruitment process across the board at Loughborough.

The Chairman: Before I hand over to Professor Rippon, as a final point you mentioned that a drop in Indian students coming to study engineering had, in terms of overall numbers, been offset to some degree by an increase in the number of Chinese students coming to study business and economics. Does it affect the viability of your courses in engineering if you have a significant drop‑off of overseas students?

Professor Allison: It does not affect the viability, inasmuch as we are very fortunate at Loughborough to have very strong recruitment in many of our engineering subjects. Some of them are at the margin of what 17 and 18 year-olds would understand engineering to be. We recruit at an A* and two As, and with that can maintain a satisfactory number to make those programmes sustainable. However, as I am sure you will all appreciate, the sort of broad financial model that the university works to as a whole at the moment requires us to recruit a certain number of students from overseas, as well as a certain number of home students. It is about that balanced picture across the piece, rather than any one particular degree or part of the academy.

Professor Rippon: The postgraduate taught issue has been the most significant for us. The data I have since 2009 have shown a decline of 70% in our postgraduate taught numbers across the board, and 14% since last year. That is particularly in subjects allied to medicine, which is one of the areas we are strong in. Our engineering numbers did take something of a hit, but nothing as significant as the subjects allied to medicine, such as pharmacy, biomedical sciences, optometry, et cetera.

With respect to country‑specific data, we have shown a decline of 69% in students from India since 2009, in particular because the subjects those students were coming to study were allied to medicine.

Q34 Lord Wade of Chorlton: Could I just get some clarification there please? When you say that the numbers have fallen, is it that the total number of your students has fallen, or the students who have come from abroad? Does that mean that the people who have not come from abroad have been made up by UK students?

Professor Rippon: Not at this stage, no. It is the students who have come from abroad who have fallen. Our UK student numbers have been—

Lord Wade of Chorlton: Overall, the total number in the university has fallen, then.

Professor Rippon: Yes, because of the decline in overseas students.

Lord Wade of Chorlton: I see, right.

The Chairman: Professor Rippon, what about the question of the quality of overseas students?

Professor Rippon: Quality is not an issue. We have set admissions criteria that students have to meet. It is not because of failing quality that numbers are dropping; it is because there are fewer of them applying. We have application and admission statistics separately.

The Chairman: I would like to follow with the question that I asked Professor Allison about the impact on particular courses, or on the financial model of the university as a whole.

Professor Rippon: We had two undergraduate courses and a postgraduate diploma that were particularly affected. We have a BS in pharmacy that required a pre‑registration year post-graduation, which the loss of the post-study work visa affected, and similarly for optometry. We also had an overseas diploma for pharmacy students. For students who had qualified as pharmacists overseas but wished to practise in the UK, there was a diploma course to upskill them. Again, that required a pre-registration year. We had to restructure those courses very quickly, and that required a certain amount of interaction with, for example, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society to see if they would become sponsors.

With respect to postgraduate taught courses, we had thriving MScs in pharmacology, pharmaceutical sciences and biomedical sciences that were hit badly by the loss of overseas students. We restructured the courses, so those courses ran, but it required us to do some fast footwork.

Professor Riordan: As far as Cardiff is concerned, we have continued to see quite strong growth in overseas students, including in STEM. What has shifted is where they are coming from. Like everybody else, we have seen reductions in students coming from India, but also from Pakistan and Bangladesh. I notice, looking at the overall figures for the sector, specifically HESA’s total entrants by subject from non‑EU countries, which I am sure you have had, that computer science, for example, has been quite badly hit. There has been a large drop, not just percentage‑wise but in actual numbers of students, from over 10,000 to under 7,000 in three years. I have no way of proving that, but I would not be surprised if that was linked to the drop in the numbers of students from India, because we tend to get quite large proportions from those countries. It might be interesting to look at whether one could relate subjects to certain countries and see whether there is a correlation there.

Q35 The Chairman: I will ask a follow-up question on the impact. Presumably, because you have had growth rather than decline, there has not been an impact on either the business model of the university or the course structure.

Professor Riordan: It probably has to a degree, because we would have expected higher growth, given the investment we have put in. These things obviously do not happen by accident. We have put very focused investment into an international office, marketing, recruitment activities and all the rest of it. We are aiming at increasing the proportion of international students to 20% over the next three or four years, which ought to be perfectly doable. The issue, then, is that we really want a fair wind for that. We would like the support for that, essentially.

The Chairman: So you have seen growth, but not as much growth as you would have liked to in relation to your strategic plan or business plan.

Professor Riordan: Yes.

The Chairman: We heard in the earlier session this morning about the difference in trajectory, particularly for Indian students coming to the UK versus going to Australia, the United States and Canada. While we have been going down, they have been going up. I wonder whether any of you look at this in relation to what is going on internationally, and what happens in your own university compared to what is happening in other countries.

Professor Riordan: Certainly, we are told by our students and our agents—we have an office in India as well—that it is the loss of the post-study work opportunities, or at least that they are nothing like as extensive as they were and do not compare well with other countries such as Canada, and indeed the US and other of our competitors. The students say, “We want to have actual experience of working in the UK”. That is bound to be good for your CV. They also want to have a chance to redress some of the debt, in some cases, that they have got themselves into by studying here, so it matters very much to them.

Q36 Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I want to pick up the same questions that Lord Willis was asking in the previous session, which I think most of you sat in on. How far is it the Immigration Rules, per se, and how far is it the way in which the rules are administered and operated? Is it this whole question of perception on the part of overseas students, particularly Indian and Pakistani students, as to what the new rules are? Is it the number of changes in those rules that have taken place? How far is this post‑study work issue, and the problems of bureaucracy associated with that, really important? How far is it changes in currency, when we have seen particularly the Indian rupee dropping in value? Insofar as it is perception, how far are your institutions trying to counter that perception? There is a range of questions there, I am afraid.

Professor Allison: As you might expect, my initial response is that the answer is as complex as your question. However, I would make one or two comments. The first is that I think there is some variation from country to country. I do not think you can turn to one country and say, “Actually, it applies there, so it applies over here”. I also think that, certainly if I think about my institution—I do not want to say this for all universities; I should not speak on behalf of other institutions—in countries where we put effort in because we want to make a difference, we can make a difference. I could give you some specific examples.

The issue, for me, interestingly—and, Baroness Sharp, it is in part in the comments you made—is the balance between reality and perception. I do not know, Lord Krebs, whether any of your Committee has seen this report. It is an independent report that was published in January 2013 by two of my colleagues. It is about perceptions. They interviewed nearly 1,000 students from overseas, some of whom were currently studying in the UK and some of whom had finished. I will give you two sets of comments, if I could turn to page 8. If it would help, I can provide you with a copy of this report.

The Chairman: That would be very helpful, yes.

Professor Allison: There are positive comments in here. You may want to receive a copy so that you can feel good about the positive comments. However, let me just give you a couple of examples of perception. One example is, “Applying for a visa is such a hassle, and actually the banking services do not really help you either”. It is not necessarily just about the visa per se, it is about other things that come together that appear to create a higher hurdle for these people than otherwise might be the case. Another is, “I would advise people to avoid coming to the UK for any matter, if they do not want to struggle with the visas. There are many other countries that are more accepting, and give you the impression that they want you to study there more”. There is something, as you perhaps implied in your question when you referred to Australia, not just about what we are doing but about how that is perceived by students who then compare us with other countries.

I turn to one final comment. Have we not occasionally heard this from our own children: “I have advised my younger brother to look elsewhere for postgrad studies. The UK is definitely not sending out good signals at the moment, and it will probably harm their universities in the future”? Now, remember, that is the perception. It is not necessarily the reality, but the question is how one overcomes those issues as much as the complexities that not all but predominantly young people see that they have to overcome in relation to other countries, be it Australia or Germany, for many Indian students thinking of engineering, or the United States, as comparators and I might also say competitors.

Professor Rippon: With respect to whether it is the rules themselves, obviously the removal of the post-study work visa is a specific issue. The financial requirements are also significant, differentially for STEM students, because the fees are higher for STEM students. As I understand it, we are partly looking at that as an issue.

With respect to the rules, it is perhaps not the rules per se but their complexity and lack of stability. You just feel that you have a handle on the particular criteria and something changes—the list of banks that are acceptable for the money to be held in changes. We had one student who had a visa refused because she had had the correct amount of money in her bank account for 27 days and it was supposed to be 28 days. It is the application of the rules, as well as the rules themselves.

Perception is a key issue, particularly in these days of social media. I do not know whether you are aware of the suggestion that there was going to be a visa bond applied for people who were coming for short periods of time. Something appeared on the Home Office website. It was removed fairly quickly when it was clear that the suggestion was for students from specific high-risk countries, even if they were bringing their families back for graduation, to be required to provide a bond of £3,000 a head. Within 24 hours, that had gone viral on social media. We were having students saying, “We do not want to come to this country now if that is what is happening”. I think the perception is very important.

Professor Riordan: Yes, the rules are complicated, expensive and ever-changing. That point has been made, I think, and it does make it difficult, as does the way they are applied. We also had an example of a student who dipped £20 below the level that you are supposed to have in your bank account for a day because of some timing-of-transfer issue, and it took us letters, phone calls and days of work to get that sorted out. You do get the impression that the rules, on occasion, can be applied in such a way that it is rather off-putting for the applicant.

On one or two other points that you made, we—I think all of us; every university—put huge effort into welcoming students and into explaining and supporting. We go to the airport to pick them up. We look after them when they are here, and we can see the results of that in the student satisfaction levels that we have, which are high.

On exchange rates, as far as the rupee is concerned that is a relatively recent development. The fall in applications from India happened before the economic crisis, or economic change, in India began to bite. It will be quite difficult to relate to this, because exchange rates are always going up and down. Obviously, it is very hard to prove causation in anything, but this is a complicated area. It is quite easy to see that when the visa rules changed, something happened in India. You could read it in all the newspapers.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: One of the remarks made by Daniel, the student representative, was that the designation of a high‑risk country had not changed. He instanced the fact that Brazil was regarded as a high-risk country and Argentina as a low‑risk country. Does that affect you at all—this designation of high-risk country?

Professor Riordan: It would contribute to the perception problem. Brazil is a very particular case because it has invested hundreds of millions of pounds of its own Government’s money in sending its students here. If you add up the whole of Science Without Borders over the whole four-year period the amount that the Brazilian Government are investing in bringing their students here will come close to £250 million. That is a huge commitment. Obviously they are sending them to other places too. You would feel a bit miffed, I suppose, if you were then told you are high risk.

Baroness Manningham-Buller: Could anybody explain to me what high risk means in this context?

Professor Riordan: Nope.

Baroness Manningham-Buller: We will have to ask the Home Office. I am sorry, but I just wondered if anybody understood.

Q37 Earl of Selborne: I wanted to come back to Professor Allison’s interesting insight from that document by your colleagues, which I look forward to reading, in which you observe that they perceive that present procedures for overseas students will, in the long term, deliver harm to universities. Of course, you as vice-chancellors are implementing business plans that were probably put in place by your predecessors. It takes a lot of long-term strategic planning to invest to keep up with STEM subjects and, indeed, other disciplines, and a large amount of capital by anyone’s standards. To what extent is this perception affecting reality as you try to implement your long-term policies? I think Professor Allison has described moving on to a new campus on the Olympic Park, and we heard that Cardiff has again planned for a growth policy, which may not be so easily delivered as you intended. Has this perception had a reality check yet?

Professor Allison: Perhaps, Lord Selborne, I will give an answer in two parts. The first is that whatever the nature of the challenge around recruiting overseas students, our approach is that we will sort it out. The reason for that is twofold. First, they are really important for cultural mix and cultural diversity on the campus. It is of benefit to UK students to have them there. The other thing is that we very much say that our internationalisation strategy is about our students having the opportunity to study overseas, as much as it is about overseas students having the opportunity to come to the UK. After all, we want global citizens to graduate: people who will have the opportunity, for example, to work for Rolls-Royce, which is one of our most significant takers of graduates, whether it is at Derby or in Singapore, where it has a major operation, so there is an element of it where we remain bullish.

However, my Council approved a new university strategy in December. We are quite conservative—it comes back to what Professor Riordan said—about the notion of growth on the Loughborough campus, but we believe there are opportunities for us in London partly because, at taught postgraduate level, of the number of students who choose to study in global cities, whether it is in this country or somewhere else.

For Loughborough, this is an important point: we work really closely with industry in all our STEM subjects. In fact, we have over 250 different partners in some shape or form, from very large global companies to SMEs. The Olympic Park will allow us to connect with iCITY and with the high-tech small SME cluster that has developed around Old Street and the silicon circle in a way that will give us real opportunities.

I will give you one example of that, although it is not from one of the countries that we have been talking about so far. Last week, we signed an agreement with MIT (the REAP programme). The Chancellor at MIT made it very clear that it was doing that with us because of the opportunity it presented its students to spend some time studying on our campus—because of the reputation we have there for the student experience—and some time in a global city, and because of the nature of the mix of students who those MIT students will be interacting with while they are with us. Of course, Loughborough students will be over at MIT in the same sort of way. Again, there is a really interesting ecosystem there.

We are conservative in our figures around the business plan within our strategy, but we believe still that there are opportunities for us where we can exploit what is special about our university, my university, so that we can relocate that somewhere else in a different sort of environment but really make it work for us.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: When you talk about the mix of students, does this include the international mix of students?

Professor Allison: Absolutely, yes. One of the things I am really proud of is that if you were to pay me a visit and I were to walk you across the campus, I could introduce you to students from over 100 different countries. Now, some of those are pretty small in number, and of course some are rather larger, but that cultural diversity, I genuinely believe, benefits the predominantly young people who are at the university in terms of the community that they form, where they sit and what they will be doing in the world post-graduation.

Professor Rippon: I would just like to echo the point about campus diversity. Another area we have been very interested in is that of engaging with South-East Asia, which resonates with developments with the Emerging Powers Fund et cetera. Vietnam in particular is a country that we are developing very close relationships with.

We have a specific university strategy to increase our student numbers. Currently, overseas students account for just over 20%. We are hoping to increase that to over 25%, and engagement with Vietnam and other countries is part of that. Certainly, we have had to revisit that target with respect to the decline in student numbers that has occurred since 2010. Although we cannot necessarily infer cause and effect, there is certainly a correlation. That is a key issue for us.

We are also developing that aspect with overseas contact. We have a big emphasis on our students spending at least a year on placement. We are hoping that by 2020, 30% of those placement opportunities will be overseas. We target very particularly the countries that send students to us and, if those are going to decline, that is going to affect our strategy in a particular way.

Professor Riordan: There are two issues that are sector-wide. One is that there are departments in universities whose student body is composed predominantly of overseas students. If that number drops too far, those departments might start becoming unviable, and they are in STEM areas. I do not think we are going to run out of business studies students. If you look at the area I mentioned earlier on, computing science, in 2010‑11 there was a 4% drop, in 2011-12 a 25% drop, and in 2012-13 a 11% drop. That is also going to affect the future workforce that is available.

I come back to this because of the steepness of the drop in that subject area and because employers want software engineers; they want people with these skills in this country, and we are continually being told that there are not enough of them. There could be strategic, longer-term consequences both for universities’ capacity to be able to put on that type of course and for the sheer numbers of graduates in those areas.

Q38 Lord Wade of Chorlton: Coming back to the point about perception, which is really interesting, it may not be just a question of perception of our Immigration Rules, but of Britain as a whole. I just wondered if you had a view on that because, clearly, Britain’s position in the world is ever-changing and people’s attitudes to us are very different. I first started at university in 1949, when Britain was the place to be and we had a lot of people from abroad. I went to Queen’s University in Belfast, and the range of people I met was quite amazing—Persians, for example. I remember having a couple of good pals from Persia—it was called Persia in those days—but clearly our role is changing. Is it right that we just look at the Immigration Rules, or should we actually look at the way we are seen by people abroad and that we are now seen in a different light? Do you have a view on that?

Professor Allison: Yes, I do. I agree with you, I think. As one of the comments I read out said, it is “visas and banks and …”. Let me give you a couple of examples. I felt tremendously sorry for the vice-chancellor at Lancaster, not least because he had only been in post for two days, when there was that terrible tragedy and one of his students was killed in Manchester. You will recall that. That got a degree of global press coverage. That does not help, because it gives an impression. We can all think, I am sure, of examples of isolated incidents of something that can, largely through inappropriate reporting in the media, become the general perception.

It comes back to the complexity of the issue and which bits we can have most effect on—not just one bit here. Which of this basket of things, if focused on—universities, government, other actors in this system—would make the most difference by changing that threshold of perception?

Professor Rippon: I possibly disagree slightly. Britain is still seen as a great place to come to, and we work quite closely with the British Council, which, as you know, has an exhibition travelling around about what is great about Britain. When I am visiting overseas, I talk to students and go to recruitment fairs. A lot of students would like to come to Britain. I do not think it is the general perception that is the problem. It is when they come up against the hurdles, which they perceive as high and changing, that it is a problem for us.

Professor Riordan: I endorse that. UK higher education has an extremely high reputation internationally, and we can evidence that with metrics. You can see very strong growth in new entrants until 2010. You have 144,000 in 2008-09, 161,000 in 2009-10, 174,000 in 2010-11, and then it flattens off and starts falling. I do not believe that our reputation has been so catastrophically dragged through the mud internationally as a country since 2010 to cause that kind of effect. Again, we cannot prove the cause, but it does look a bit funny.

Q39 Lord Peston: I have two questions. One follows on from an earlier question from Lord Wade—not this one but the earlier one—in case I misunderstood it. He asked you whether, if you cannot get foreign students, you can top up with British students, and I thought your answer was no. Is that right? Is that what you said?

Professor Rippon: That is a slightly different question. The cap on student numbers is a separate issue and that is changing. We could have more UK students, but our big emphasis is on the diversity of the student community.

Lord Peston: I understand that bit, but that was not his question. His question was: if you cannot get the foreigners, can you have British? I am still not clear what the answer is.

Professor Rippon: You would probably have to change the nature of the courses, because some of the courses are particularly attractive to overseas students for particular reasons. The short answer is yes, but you would have to change the nature of the portfolio you were offering.

Lord Peston: Let us be specific. Give us an example of a course that the Indians are not going to now.

Professor Rippon: There are several: pharmaceutical sciences—

Lord Peston: So you could not admit more British students to pharmaceutical sciences.

Professor Rippon: We would have to change the nature of the course.

Lord Peston: If I may say so, that is a bit peculiar. If it is the same course, you cannot admit British students to it. That is what you are saying.

Professor Rippon: The other thing is whether or not it is the kind of course students are attracted to and for what reasons. That would be an additional issue.

Lord Peston: I understand that. That leaves me with the comment that I am really glad I gave up being a professor many years ago, because in the days when I was a professor you just admitted the students you wanted to admit. But I gather I am living in the past. Those days have gone. Is that right?

Professor Rippon: To be brutally frank, finance is also an issue with respect to the importance of overseas students.

Lord Peston: Yes, well, you will, again, be happy to know that when I was a professor the word “finance” was never mentioned.

Professor Riordan: What has changed is that we have now moved to a mass education system. That used not to be the case, so there are far, far more students coming. Also, up until two years ago you could not have just said, in England, anyway, “Yes, we will just take more home students”, because the numbers were controlled and allocated. Now we are moving towards a system where there will very shortly be no controls on student numbers at all, pretty much. That has already been relaxed in England and, to a degree, in Wales, where we are. The whole game has changed enormously.

It could be possible to expand home numbers, but you have to take a view on the size, shape and type of university that you want to be and that you are. Very much as Bob was saying earlier, we want a diverse student community. It is good for our students. It is very hard to get our students to go abroad. We have a national strategy for trying to get UK students to spend at least some time abroad. If they will not do that, which quite a few of them will not and do not want to—we want to get more of them doing it—being in a much more diverse university community is hugely advantageous for them and to this country.

Lord Peston: Could I just follow up, Lord Allison—professor, I mean; you do not have a peerage yet—on what you said in that document? You did say you would let us have it.

Professor Allison: I would be delighted to do that. I will send a copy to the clerk.

Lord Peston: Part of what you were saying in terms of whether people would want to come to you was, “Do they feel at home there?” . That was the sort of point you were making. Indeed, it reminded me, again, of the olden days. People who were from families in this country who had no university experience would go to the open day and would ask me, “What is your advice?”. My advice was always, “Do you feel at home there?”. They would say, “But is that university not a better one?”. I would say, “Well, academically, it is regarded as such, but your child is going to spend three important years of their life there and feeling at home there is the vital thing”.

Now, do I take it that you are arguing—and this applies to the rest of you—that it is vital in our country for universities to make foreign students feel welcome, and the main part of that is feeling at home there? Would that be the philosophy that you are trying to get over to us?

Professor Allison: I think you are absolutely right. Lord Peston, could I just briefly return to your previous question? Then I will answer that one. The comment I was just going to add was that for all universities—coming to your point about whether you could take the home students to replace the overseas—there is a balance of quantity versus quality. It depends where you are on that spectrum. We could replace them all if we wanted, if we were just working on a principle that we do not work on, which is “stack ‘em high and teach ‘em cheap”.

To come back to the question you just asked, you are absolutely right. This is one of the things that we work really hard at. I must give the Loughborough Students’ Union credit for this. I say that I have a students’ union, but they are independent from the university. They have one sabbatical officer dedicated to looking after international students and helping them to integrate and feel part not just of the university but of the town and everything that goes on there.

It is not just the taught programmes. If I attend sport, which of course is one thing we are particularly proud of, or other student societies, all the international students, providing they are in zones that are culturally acceptable to them, have the opportunity to form that broader nature of a community and feel at home. At the end of the day, one of the things that we have to do—and I am very aware that I am in a very privileged position in terms of the university that I am at—is a little bit of combating national perception. There is a little bit before they get to us and then, once they are with us, it is the work that we do to help them feel that they are genuinely part of a community.

Q40 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: As someone who went to university with students from Mesopotamia, I can do a little bit better than Lord Wade. Indeed, in answer, one point you did not mention, Professor Allison, was that universities are significantly dependent on overseas students to balance their books. You cannot take UK students and balance your books in the same way. You perhaps can do at undergraduate level, but at postgraduate level there is a significant fee differential between what you are getting in terms of one for the other.

What I wanted to ask you really was this. This short report really has to be positive in what it can recommend to government and, indeed, what it can ask the university sector to do. What puzzles me is that your panel, and indeed the previous panel, with the exception of Daniel Stevens, the international student officer, is basically saying that the Immigration Rules per se are not the main cause here: that they are marginal. What is happening is to do with the interpretation, the perception, of those rules and everything else that goes with it.

I would like each of you to say what this Committee can recommend to government that would actually make a difference. Do not ask for something that is beyond the pale. What should we be doing to actually make sure that that is the case? When I look at the applications for tier 2 visas, which are quite separate if you have graduated here, I do not see that being advertised as a separate entity. It is linked in with tier 2 and quotas and the rest of it, but that is not the case. When I look at what is happening with PhD students being allowed to have a year of supervised looking-for-work after, I do not see that being advertised. What can we recommend that will make a big difference to resolve a problem, about which I think all of us are united in saying, “We have to get this right”?

Professor Rippon: I would have thought that the return of the post-study work visa would make a big difference to the practicalities of the existence of some of the courses, and to the perception. I think we heard previously that not all students would necessarily take up the post-study work visa, but the fact that it is there gives the impression that Britain is a country that wants to take you further.

Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Can I just pick you up on that? With the Rolls-Royces of this world that Professor Allison mentioned, there is no problem there. They have huge facilities to be able to process the tiered applications and to get those people in. The SMEs that clearly need these overseas students, to give them that link back into Bangladesh or Brazil or wherever, do not have that. I do not know of a single university that is processing those on behalf of SMEs, unless yours is.

Professor Rippon: We certainly have a link with our SMEs for our students.

Lord Willis of Knaresborough: That is different, is it not?

Professor Rippon: On some of the changes we made to our courses, we would not call them SMEs, but, for our optometry students, we had to work closely with Specsavers, Vision Express et cetera. Obviously they are not an SME, but we are aware of that.

It is also about the salary level as well. For our pharmacy students, or the optometry students in particular, the idea that you require a salary of, I think, £20,300—I am not quite sure where that came from—is completely unrealistic. No pre-reg student is going to be able to command a salary like that. That is quite a specific issue that we could look at.

Professor Allison: I would suggest three things. One is to look across the board where the Government have the opportunity to set or tweak regulatory frameworks to see whether there are things that can be done just to maintain appropriate levels of—I do not know what you would call it—control or oversight. If at all possible, we need to bring down barriers to just make things slightly easier to do in some instances. As I say, that is not just about the visa bit, it is wherever there is regulation.

The other one—some of this goes on—is to continue to work together in the sector and at all levels of government to give the right messages, but to back that up with an evidence base to demonstrate that perception and reality, where they are different, are indeed shown to be different.

The final one, particularly in relation to other countries where it is perceived that things have gone the other way, is to counterbalance that. One of the issues with the tier 2 visa was that as we made a decision that took it in one direction, Australia took it in the other. It is about how those things play out in the minds of people overseas and what we can do to influence that in a positive way.

Professor Riordan: When the Government or the Home Office are setting visa fees, it would be very helpful if that could be done in the context of what our rivals, our competitors, are doing. If a look was taken at what is happening in Australia and Canada, that would be good. The post‑study work visa is a big issue, and it is something the Government can influence. It is not about saying that it has to be five years. You can go closer. We could look at how to make the UK more competitive without causing a problem in migration. I am sure that could be done. Just on a point of fact, as a sector we spend £68 million a year on processing visas as it is, so this is a major element of our expenditure.

Q41 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Just to pick up a specific point, one area where you might try to influence government policy is on the Immigration Bill that is currently going through Parliament. There are provisions there that I would have thought would adversely affect perception in other countries, specifically the suggestion that there should be a surcharge for health, which would affect students. It is not a very large sum, but the effect could be quite serious in the image that we present to students. There is also the suggestion that landlords should have to check the immigration status of students, which seems to me an impossible requirement. Are those areas in which you are lobbying government ferociously, and should we being doing something about that?

Professor Riordan: Yes, is that answer to that. On the health levy, I know that the basic level is £150, but if you are coming for a three-year programme you have to pay that all in advance. If you come to do a PhD with your family, you have to pay for the whole family. That can add up to a couple of thousand that you have to find before you start, so it does create a significant hurdle.

The issue of landlords is very serious. It is too much, I think, and we think, as a sector, to expect landlords to be doing this. Secondly, if you were a landlord, your natural reaction would be, as I think we have heard in previous evidence, to say, “Well, it is much easier not to bother with the international students”.

Even if we are able to accommodate them—and not all universities have enough of their own accommodation to do this—we will then feel under an obligation to house international students throughout their time at university in preference to home students, for one thing. You can see situations where it is going to look very discriminatory. If you are told that the reason you cannot get anywhere in the private sector very easily is because you are from overseas, that is not the kind of message we want to be sending out.

Professor Rippon: I agree with that. With respect to the landlord issue, it is sometimes the cost of university halls of residence et cetera that could obviously be partly within our control but may become discriminatory. We have an international student barometer survey and we come top with respect to the quality of our residences and bottom with respect to the cost. A lot of our international students look at private accommodation, which is quite expensive in Birmingham. If that was not available, due to all the kinds of issues that have been raised, and they had to stay in halls of residence, that would be an additional financial burden.

Professor Allison: I agree with everything that is being said, but could I make a further landlord comment that has been made by all the previous witnesses in front of you today? In any university, the largest landlord is the university, with the students that they have in their halls of residence. We could all set up a system. I do not have an answer, but the interesting question that we are thinking through is: could there be some link between the system that we have and landlords? The bit that concerns me is this. We have a group of landlords who work really closely with us. We set a standard, for example, to make sure that there is not going to be a boiler that has not been serviced and that will end up causing a tragedy due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Those are the landlords who I am quite sure will want to work with us on this issue.

The group that concerns me, and they exist in every city, are the unscrupulous landlords who are not interested in anything like that. Foreign students come to a country, and many of them have not been to that country before. They come into a system, or they are trying to find accommodation in a system, where they are away from home and they have all the vulnerabilities that we know go with that. My concern is that they are a group at risk because of that. What can we do to set up a system to make sure that that vulnerability does not put those students at risk?

I could imagine ways in which we could work as a sector with people to do it if there was a requirement of those other people to work with us in an appropriate way. I am concerned, as Colin has indicated, that the current draft legislation would lead, again, to a perception but none the less a sense of a system here that is not supportive and welcoming of these students, particularly if they are here for three years. The majority of our students come into our halls of residence in year one, but then go out and find private landlord-based accommodation in year two in many universities. We need to think through how we can potentially get the linkage to ease that and make it a more welcoming and easier process.

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: You are making an assumption that the legislation is going to pass as it is. My question is what you are doing about persuading the Government not to have this provision in the Bill.

Professor Allison: You are absolutely right, and that is why I said “draft legislation”. I have spoken to my local MP, Nicky Morgan. She is very aware of it, and, of course, we have been petitioning the relevant government Ministers at BIS as well.

The Chairman: I would like to thank you very much indeed for your evidence this morning. It has been extremely valuable to us. Professor Allison has kindly agreed to send that survey into us, but if either of the other two witnesses wishes to add any evidence, that will become part of our published evidence. In due course, you will receive a transcript of this session for you to make minor editorial corrections to, if you so wish, and, of course, you will see our report in due course. Thank you very much indeed.