The current economic crunch in Nigeria has affected payments by Nigerian students for the new academic session which will start in September 2024 in universities in the United Kingdom as deposits have dropped by 65% compared to that of 2023, a report by the Financial Times of London has revealed.
The report also revealed that payments by students from India reduced by 44% compared to last year’s deposit. Nigeria and India are among the top three contributors to the league of United Kingdom’s international students.
The paper quoted data from Enroly, a web platform used for managing enrollment by international students, and said there is a 35 percent reduction in deposits for places on UK university courses overall by foreign students in August 2024 compared to August 2023.
As a result of this development, analysts inferred that international students are expected to return in lesser numbers to UK universities and that the higher education sector could encounter financial problems after it became heavily reliant on higher-paying overseas students.
While talking about the drop in deposits, Paul Kett, senior education and skills adviser at PwC UK, said: “This is still going to be a challenging and critical recruitment round for many.
“The impact on individual institutions will be highly variable depending on their relative attractiveness and which markets they are predominantly focused on. It’s likely some will need to take further significant action to secure their financial sustainability.”
Last month, Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, stated that the new Labour government wanted to welcome international students and condemned the negative rhetoric of the former Conservative administration which successive Tory ministers deployed as they attempted to cut overall migration figures.
Jeffrey Williams, Enroly’s Chief Executive, stated that the “early signs” of recovery showed efforts by the new government to stabilize immigration policy.
He said: “Concerns regarding the potential elimination of the postgraduate route work visa have been assuaged.”
He added that this had been helped by “continued political uncertainty” in other markets like Australia and Canada.
Harry Anderson, Deputy Director of Universities UK International, the sector lobby group, stated that the international environment remained volatile for universities as they keep looking to diversify the range of countries where they recruit students.
So far, Labour has retained the Conservative’s ban on most graduate students coming with family members, which Anderson said would still pose competitive threats to UK institutions.
Anderson said: “Most of our competitor destinations do allow students to bring their family members, and most of the growth in recent years has been in postgraduate taught courses where students typically tend to be older and have family members.
“Still, the hope is that stability signalled by the new government will benefit the next admissions cycle after the turbulence of the last 18 months. But the sector needs to be working hard with embassies to communicate this.”
The regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), has started preparing for a wave of university insolvencies, advertising for a contract of up to £4mn for professional services companies to carry out restructuring programmes.
The office made the move after financial accounts showed over-optimistic assumptions about the growth of overseas recruitment over the next few years. In its annual report, the OfS accused universities of “optimism bias” for projecting 35 percent growth in international entrants in 2022-26.
