europeanhighered Brexit, EU students, Mobility

Does the UK really want to lose the EU student?

exitThe final Brexit deal is looming and what are its implications for EU students?

Previously the UK HE sector enjoyed a tsunami of EU students to its HEIs in comparison to its current prospects. Already the numbers are dwindling.

Before too much talk of Brexit, in 2013/2014, of a total of 2,299,355 (HESA) students enrolled at UK universities, the UK welcomed a total of 125,300 EU students into its HEIs, of which 73,100 were undergraduates (UKCISA). They might only make up 5%, but what would the UK student body look like without these students? Currently, EU students pay the same fees (up to £9000) and have the same benefits as UK students, apart from the fact that they are not eligible for the maintenance loan – an interesting point we will come back to.

Depending on the final deal, Brexit could entail an increase in fees for EU students to the same cost as international students (often at least £11,000/year), which is payable upfront. Simply put, EU students would be considered the same as, and would have to start competing with, international students. It is inevitable that such a fee hike would result in a decrease in the number of EU students to UK HEIs, especially as the number of cheaper courses in English offered by universities in other member states is on a steady rise.

So how will the universities fill this gap left by EU applicants?

The answer seems clear cut: with UK students (1). This may seem a favourable situation for the UK, but as the if these UK students were not previously offered a place, it indicates that the quality was not sufficiently high. This means that if universities start to offer places to these students, it will invariably lower the quality of students entering UK universities and securing a place at university will become easier.

Again, this might appear to be an attractive prospect, but the consequence of qualification inflation among the UK population will not do any favours to the labour market when an increase in British graduates are eagerly seeking jobs, or rather to the students themselves as competition for jobs becomes tougher. If the places are occupied by EU students, at least they will spend three years contributing to the British economy and then a good proportion return to seek employment at home or elsewhere in Europe.

A frequent concern posed by Eurosceptics is the prospect of the UK funding an increasing number of EU students, since they have the same entitlement to fee loans as UK students. This is to say that they worry that EU students will benefit from loans provided by the UK taxpayer’s money and then return to their home countries, avoiding repayment.

We can identify a series of holes in this argument. Firstly, EU students are only entitled to the fee loan and not the maintenance loan. Therefore, if we go back to the subject of UK students filling the gap left by EU students, the UK finds itself in the potential situation of having to fund 125,300 more maintenance loans. Based on the 2013/2017 figures, if a typical maximum maintenance loan is £8700 (2) and a course lasts 3 years, the UK students replacing the EU students could potentially cost the UK taxpayers around £1,907,910.00 (3) more than the amount they would have to fund the EU students.

Furthermore, we can say that there is just as much risk that the UK students do not repay their loans as the EU students, especially if an increased number of UK graduates implies that finding a job in the UK would be more difficult.

It can also be added that those EU students studying in Scotland pay the same fees as Scottish students (no more than £2000/year), lowering the borrowed amount in this area. If these EU students were replaced by students from England and Wales, who would have to pay the higher rate of up to £9000 (of course, some will be replaced by Scottish students, who cost the same as EU students), the UK taxpayer would have to fund around an extra £7000/year per student.

We can add that if EU students are not eligible for a maintenance loan, they are forced to self-fund their stay in the UK, suggesting that they come from wealthier backgrounds. With the more vigorous overseas assessment that the Student Loans Company have now adopted and with wealthier backgrounds, we can even suggest that in some cases EU students are more likely to earn the minimum salary for repayment and pay off their loan, especially if we take into consideration that the top two EU-sending countries are Germany and France (UKICISA).

On a cultural level, without EU students attending UK universities, British universities risk becoming more inward-looking and domestic students’ exposure to European culture, traditions and ways of life will diminish. Moreover, this inward-looking environment and a decreased contribution from EU students would impact the quality and approach of the scholarly research produced in the UK.

This argument on the impact on research – and there are others – can be saved for another time, but suffice it to say that the UK’s exit from the EU would impact greatly on higher education even solely in terms of the quality of students, student funding and the student experience.

(1) Currently, there is a minimum number of EU and UK students that universities can offer places to, and then over this number, they can offer as many places to international students as they see fit. EU and UK students are treated equally in this minimum quota, so the international students could not occupy the places left by EU students. EU students would become international students and the places would be left to UK students only.

(2) Living away from home, outside London (Student Finance England)

(3) Based on 73,100 loans of £8700 per year for 3 years

europeanhighered Brexit, EU funding, Funding, Research

What would the UK look like without EU research funding?

ResearchWith Brexit creeping closer, do we need to start imagining a nation state without EU funding?

Really, it doesn’t bear thinking about and here’s why.

The European Union (EU) has provided funding for collaborative research and development in the form of Framework Programmes. During early European integration in the 1950s, EU funding was limited to the industrial sectors in which the European Community concentrated its efforts: coal, steel and atomic energy, and individual research programmes were later established in fields such as energy, environment and molecular biology. It was then Etienne Davignon, European Commissioner for Industrial Affairs and Energy in 1981, who proposed the consolidation of the research programmes into a single framework.  In 1984, the Framework Programme was born: FP1 running from 1984-1987 with a budget of €3.3bn. FP2 ran from 1987-1991 with €5.4bn, FP3 from 1991-1994 with €6.6bn, FP4 from 1994-1998 with €13.2bn, FP5 from 1998-2002 with €14.9bn, FP6 from 2002-2006 with €19.3bn, and FP7 from 2007-2013 with €55.9bn. The current Framework Programme is the Horizon 2020 Programme, running from 2014-2020 with a total budget of €80 billion (European Commission).

Since its membership to the EU, the UK has accessed funding through these Framework Programmes, from which it has benefitted greatly. Under the last Framework Programme, FP7, the UK received almost €7 billion, which constitute 15.5% of the funding allocated and in 2013 the UK received a higher value of grants than any other participating country. In particular, the higher education sector secures over 70% of the funding allocated to the UK (Corbett, R.), therefore representing a crucial source of income for HEIs. In fact, the UK government’s “Review of the Balance of Competences between the United Kingdom and the European Union: Research and Development”, identifies EU research activity as one of the areas that is most closely aligned with the UK’s interests. Ultimately, the more the EU invests in research and development, the more the UK benefits.

In addition to the Horizon 2020 Programme, the EU also allocates funding to its member states through the Erasmus+ Programme, for students to study and train abroad, and through its European Research Council grants, providing funding  to individual researchers.

So here’s the question: what would the UK look like from the point of view of research funding if it is no longer a member of the EU? Being a member of the EU makes the UK eligible to bid for EU research funding, so the simple answer is that the UK would no longer be eligible for the funding under the same terms, leaving the higher education sector in particular high and dry. It would be incorrect to say the UK would no longer have access to EU funding, but the UK would lose its voice in the development of EU research and higher education strategies and its ability to influence the regulatory environment, both of which have provided favourable circumstances for securing research funding. Furthermore, we should consider at this point the response received by Switzerland from the EU when its referendum was held on the free movement of workers between the EU and Switzerland. The EU came down hard on Switzerland’s access to EU funding as an associate state, which, some say also acted as a warning sign to the UK in the case that it should turn its back on the EU in a forthcoming referendum.

Without this access to funding and therefore, potentially €7 billion less better off than usual, what begs the question is whether the UK would be capable of making the impact in research and development that it is used to. Even if the UK government suggests it would invest enough of the national budget in research to compensate that lost from EU funding, namely from the funds saved from EU membership, can we really trust that this would be the case? We had better hope so, because a severe loss of research funding would tragically destabilise the UK’s influence and position in global research and development, not to mention the fact that a limit to the funding of HEIs would create serious restrictions on their overall functioning.