This is an editorial. It represents the view of the editors.
England's government wants two things at once. It says it values international students, who bring talent, research and billions of pounds into the country. And from August 2028 it will charge universities £925 a year for every one of them.
The reasoning is not hard to follow. The revenue was earmarked for maintenance grants for disadvantaged home students, a worthy goal. But the instrument is blunt, and its costs will fall on the wrong people.
Who actually pays
The Higher Education Policy Institute estimates the levy will cost English universities just over £620 million a year. Most of that falls on a handful of institutions that recruit internationally at scale: University College London alone faces an estimated £42 million.
Universities will try to pass some of this on. Fees for international students, already among the highest in the world, will rise. The students who feel it most will not be the wealthy ones. They will be the self-funded master's student from Lagos or Dhaka who has already stretched a family's savings to the limit.
A market that is already shrinking
This is not a moment of booming demand. Universities UK reported a 6.1 per cent fall in international enrolments in 2024/25. London Economics has counted roughly 54,500 fewer international first-year students than in 2022/23. Australia, Canada and the United States are all tightening their own rules. A country that wants to stay competitive does not add a new charge when its competitors are stumbling.
What should change
The government has refused further exemptions, arguing they would "jeopardise" the revenue. It should think again on two narrow points:
- Scholarship holders. Students funded by their governments or by charitable scholarships are exactly the people the UK says it wants. Charging universities for hosting them makes no sense.
- Doctoral researchers. PhD students teach, run experiments and publish. They are as much staff as students. The levy should not treat them as a revenue line.
Neither change would gut the policy. Both would protect its stated aims. With legislation due after this autumn's budget, there is still time to make them.