International recruitment and TNE are not a straight swap
There are typically three reasons why UK transnational education provision crosses the threshold of media or policymaker attention.
Two of these are not going away anytime soon: entanglement with national security issues, such as when an overseas partner comes under fire for its links to purportedly unfriendly foreign governments, and questions of finances, whether it’s via the occasional report of hefty losses accrued on overseas ventures or simply the fact of UK universities making big international investments while cutting provision or jobs “back home”.
The third source of possible blowback – as perfectly encapsulated by the Telegraph’s choice of “Half a million students awarded UK degrees without setting foot in Britain” as a headline last winter – is in the occasional moment when commentators belatedly notice the scale, range and (all things considered) success of UK TNE, and then seek to frame it as something that the average member of the public should take exception to, rather than be proud of. This can sometimes be linked to the idea that TNE is a “cheap” way to get a degree, and unfair on home students in some way.
This latter line of attack has never gained much traction, if we’re honest – and it’s one that the International Education Strategy seeks to firmly lay to rest once and for all. The strategy itself, and other recent government-led initiatives such as last autumn’s India trade delegation, frame TNE as an eminently scalable export activity, one that brings cash in from abroad with little obvious downside for the folks back home.
While many responses to the IES from within the sector saw this as, at best, an oversimplification, as a broad-strokes vision for UK higher education’s role on the world stage, it’s likely pretty compelling: non-partisan – who doesn’t love exports? – and therefore politically sustainable.
(The choice of headline target also neatly sidesteps the question of education imports – that is, the cost of investment in overseas provision made by notionally public bodies which involves money leaving the UK, generally in ways that no-one is measuring, or at least reporting. It’s similarly convenient that, for the purposes of the education exports statistics, international student spending on living costs within the UK is calculated as if it is all based on savings they bring with them, rather than earnings from employment alongside studies, some of which may also be repatriated. But I digress.)
There are now more students studying higher education via diverse TNE routes “offshore” than there are international students in the UK – and this seems nailed on to remain a permanent fixture of the HE landscape. Press reaction to the international education strategy, limited as it was, largely seized on the idea that UK universities were being told to recruit to TNE rather than bring more students to their home campuses – that the weight distribution across the two ends of the seesaw should be shifted.
The missing piece of analysis, both for the government and for the sector, is the relationship between the two. No-one with any experience in international student recruitment of any kind would say there is a binary choice between recruiting a student to the UK or recruiting a student to a TNE programme – but the interplay between these two phenomena now needs a proper unpacking.
Strangely articulated
The first thing to note is that for many UK universities the opportunities of TNE do not match up to the UG/PG full-time degree approach that student visa requirements have largely railroaded the sector to follow with recruitment to the UK. For many, the promise of the international education strategy’s emphasis on soft power and the role of Foreign Office brokering suits their preference for areas like public sector workforce development or executive education.
But even where the forms of provision are similar, there’s little reason to assume that the students are as well. TNE can form an integrated part of already existing national university entry systems (as in China) whereas going abroad is something distinct. Price points are hugely varied, but clearly very different from the cost of study in the UK, often with complex revenue-sharing arrangements. Even those students set on acquiring an overseas awarded degree are often making a choice among the various international campuses in their country or region, rather than looking specifically for what the available UK offer is and thinking about whether to “come here” or “stay there”.
One longstanding goal of overseas programme delivery has been to incentivise further study in the UK, whether through articulation arrangements (two years there, two years here, for example) or at different course levels. And from the student point of view, this can be the reason to explore transnational programmes in the first place. Seen in this light, one consequence of expanding TNE ought to be steadily rising demand for UK-based provision in turn – and the model then gets complicated if the government is unwilling to accommodate much further growth from students of those countries where it wants new overseas campuses set up.
How the international student levy interacts here is an important point, and it’s unsurprising to see sector consultation responses flagging this, for example this from Universities UK:
The government’s International Education Strategy (IES) promotes transnational education (TNE) models such as articulation pathways (eg 2+1 model). However, if institutions are liable for the full levy on short onshore components with limited fee income, providers may reduce participation in these models, undermining a core pillar of the IES and limiting progression routes into UK study.
Similarly the very first section in the Russell Group’s consultation response calls for various types of TNE to explicitly be made exempt, including distance learning and articulation, rather than the government’s imprecise promise to leave out of scope TNE that is “delivered by providers in a country other than the United Kingdom.”
The levy aside, however, the more complicated issues relate to how students are treated, especially if the policy priority is to keep demand offshore.
The genuine student test
There was an eye-opening story in the international higher education press a couple of weeks ago, based on social media posts from education agents in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lankan students applying for Australian visas had been suddenly met with a flurry of rejections, with one particular line recurring in the stated reasons for refusal:
I have had regard to whether the applicant has reasonable reasons for not undertaking the study in their home country or region if a similar course is already available there.
The applicant failed to articulate reasonable motives for not undertaking similar courses available in the home country.
The lack of consideration by the applicant raises concerns regarding their genuine motivation to study in Australia.
The issue seemed to be – on the surface at least – that, as various Australian universities offer TNE provision in Sri Lanka, unless the applicant could come up with plausible-sounding reasons why studying in Australia would have been materially different, then they did not meet the Australian government’s “genuine student” test and were clearly hoping to make the journey for other, suspect reasons.
Deeper digging by outlets including PIE News presented a less clear-cut picture, suggesting that this reason for refusal has been around for a while, and that there was no reason to assume it was directly related to TNE availability, though the arbitrariness of its application was raising concerns. That said, one of the agents quoted in the original story noted that some affected applicants had already completed TNE study in Sri Lanka and were looking to articulate onto Australian-based courses.
The question of the relationship between home country study availability and grounds for visa refusal is relevant to the UK context too, given ever more political and regulatory emphasis on what makes a “genuine” student. The term recurs several times in last year’s immigration white paper, and UKVI caseworkers have a complicated series of tests, inevitably involving plenty of interpretation, to determine whether a study visa applicant is genuine. These involve, among other things, educational history and motivation for coming to the UK.
It’s therefore unsurprising that the internet is flooded with self-help guides for students on how to supposedly ace credibility interviews for UK university study. Last year already saw what was briefed to the press as a “crackdown” on visas which would see UKVI caseworkers given “greater powers to reject applicants for short-term English language and pre-degree courses” (this was via the addition of a genuine intention to study rule to the guidance – in reality bringing the short-term study visa in line with others, but the framing was notable).
Clearly, we’re not yet at a point where students who want to come to the UK would be seen as less genuine if they had UK TNE options in their own country. But there are some awkward parallels with the assumptions that get made about why international students choose to travel – the “immigration not education” narrative – that are worth the sector being alive to. And it’s another reason why seeing TNE as a straightforward swap for international recruitment is fraught with more complexity than is typically admitted in policy.
Little pieces of export earnings
There are a host of other reasons why a straightforward seesaw relationship between “onshore” and “offshore” break down on contact with the facts – there are whole volumes to be written, for example, on the differences in student protection on offer. The question of academic freedom for those studying in other countries seems to have ebbed away in inverse correlation to the growing impetus to go forth and do more TNE – the sector’s standard line (as can be seen in statements to the press here and here) appears to have become that “anyone working or studying at our universities should know that their rights to personal and academic freedom are protected when they are on British soil” (my emphasis, clearly).
The two forms of provision – which at any rate both contain vast potential for different kinds of delivery – are patently not a zero sum game, but equally they are not a mutually reinforcing virtuous circle. A sector that wants to demonstrate its value to the nation through its overseas activity will need to keep the complex relationship between the two under careful watch.
It’s also worth remembering that framing TNE provision as a big earner for the UK runs the risk of repeating similar mistakes as the Conservatives’ attempts to sell onshore recruitment in the same economic terms in the previous international education strategy. Wherever they study, international students are not just fungible blocks that represent possible income streams – they have subsequent educational destinations, contributions to research and knowledge exchange, labour market outcomes, foreign policy implications, and in many cases future roles to play in the HE workforce.
It’s true that, when someone is studying towards a UK degree overseas, these considerations do not play out in the same way as with international student recruitment. But in both cases there is the potential for simplistic, context-blind approaches – whether by government, or by the recruiting institutions themselves – to lead to unexpected consequences.
