Britain’s universities are being pushed towards another round of cuts as international student applications fall and a funding model built on fees and debt begins to crack.
Home Office figures show that student visa applications fell by 11 percent in the year to the end of July. Some universities fear international enrolments could drop by as much as 30 percent. University leaders are warning that jobs, courses and entire institutions may now be at risk.
Yet there’s no shortage of demand for education. A record 194,800 English 18-year-olds were accepted by their first-choice university this year. Young people still want to study despite high fees, insecure graduate employment and decades of attacks on working-class living standards.
That contradiction tells us what the crisis is really about. Britain has students who want to learn, workers capable of teaching them and universities able to provide the education. What it doesn’t have is a funding system organised around social need. Universities have been forced to behave like businesses, with students treated as sources of revenue and courses judged according to their performance on a balance sheet.
Prof Shitij Kapur, vice-chancellor of King’s College London, gave a blunt account of what declining international enrolments will mean:
“The critical thing is what this cycle will entail, which does not become clear till about October. The simple rubric is that every five international students impact one university job. And these falling numbers will invariably impact the financial health and staff complement of universities.”
The dependence revealed by this calculation isn’t accidental. Successive governments deliberately withdrew reliable public funding and replaced it with tuition fees, student debt and competition for overseas income. Universities were encouraged to recruit international students paying far higher fees in order to plug the holes left by the state.
Domestic undergraduate fees were frozen at £9,250 between 2017 and 2025, allowing inflation to cut their real value by around a third. Later increases will largely be swallowed by the Starmer government’s £925 levy on every international student.
University leaders are now demanding that the levy be dropped. But their protests leave the basic market structure untouched. They want the international fee stream restored because the whole system has become dependent on it.
International students didn’t cause this crisis. They’ve been exploited by it. Britain’s ruling class welcomes them when they arrive carrying high fees, then denounces them when anti-migrant politics requires another target. They’re counted as valuable customers by university accountants and as suspect migrants by the Home Office.
This is how imperialism operates in education. Britain trades on the accumulated prestige of institutions built during its period as the dominant imperial power. It uses the English language, historic university brands and its place in the world economy to sell expensive degrees internationally. The education system converts global inequalities into revenue, drawing money and skilled young people from other countries while maintaining a border regime that sorts human beings according to wealth, nationality and usefulness to capital.
That isn’t internationalism. It’s an export market wearing academic robes.
Russell Group leaders complain that declining international recruitment has already cost Britain a net economic benefit of nearly £3bn. Their argument shows how completely capitalist assumptions dominate the discussion. Universities must justify themselves through their contribution to economic growth, international competitiveness and Britain’s position on the “world stage.” Education as a collective human good barely enters the picture.
The consequences are already appearing. The University of Exeter has announced the immediate closure of geography courses at its Penryn campus in Cornwall, including courses to which school leavers had applied this year.
“We recognise that this is disappointing for affected applicants and difficult for colleagues associated with these programmes,” an Exeter spokesperson said.
For students who planned their futures around those courses, and for workers whose livelihoods depend on them, “disappointing” doesn’t begin to cover it. But this bloodless managerial language is typical of the marketised university. Courses disappear, jobs are cut and workloads rise, all presented as unavoidable adjustments to financial reality.
The people expected to absorb the crisis are those at the bottom. University workers face redundancies, casual contracts and heavier workloads. Students receive fewer courses, less teaching and poorer support while accumulating enormous debts. International students are charged a premium and blamed for supposedly abusing the immigration system. None of these groups designed the funding model, but all of them are made to pay for its failure.
David Willetts, the Conservative former universities minister who helped construct the high-fee system, now warns that a university could go under. His answer is predictably to make students pay even more:
“There is indeed a risk of a university going under [through] financial crisis, but what worries me more is just all the cutting back on the quality of the education experience of the students and I think we have an obligation to students to ensure their courses are properly funded, including by putting up fees so that the resource goes in.”
This is the circular logic of bourgeois policy. Tuition fees help create a debt-laden, unstable market, and the proposed solution is higher tuition fees. Proper funding becomes inseparable from pushing more of the cost onto individual students and workers rather than meeting it collectively.
Skills minister Jacqui Smith expressed the same class outlook when she said: “For most people, going to university is a very good and important investment in their future earning potential and in their life.”
Education is reduced to an individual investment made in the hope of securing higher wages. The student becomes an investor in their own labour power, carrying the financial risk personally. If the promised graduate job doesn’t appear, the market isn’t held responsible. The individual is.
The capitalist state presents this arrangement as natural because it conceals the political choices underneath it. There’s no physical shortage of lecturers, classrooms, knowledge or willing students. The shortage exists in university accounts because access to these resources is governed by money. Socially necessary activity is declared “unaffordable” when it doesn’t produce the required income.
The argument within the ruling class offers only different ways of preserving that system: raise domestic fees, recover international fee income or cut courses and workers. Each option treats education as a commodity and leaves students carrying the debt.
Falling international applications didn’t create the university crisis. They exposed a crisis built over decades. The education market is behaving exactly as markets do: turning a social need into a commodity, then destroying parts of the provision when the commodity no longer brings in enough cash. Students want to learn and workers are ready to teach, but under capitalism that’s never enough.
