Emphasising the economic impact of international students has been “quite successful” in the “short-term”, the director of Universities UK International (UUKI) has said.

But according to Jamie Arrowsmith, the laser-eyed focus on how such students financially contribute to UK universities and the wider economy has “in the long-term, created a big challenge”.

His remarks came on the same day as government figures revealed that student visa applications had dropped by 16 per cent.

Arrowsmith, who has led the organisation for nearly four years, told the European Association for International Education (EAIE) conference in Glasgow on 10 September that economic arguments were starting to “frame the public debate” to what he implied may be a disproportionate extent.

ߣߣ��Ƶ

“All of those wider arguments [about value] that we may have around the international student: none of those make it into the public domain,” he said. “It all becomes [about] the economic benefit. And, actually, I think what we’re seeing in some of the public polling now is that universities’ international students are only seen solely through that lens…I think that’s a problem for us as an organisation like Universities UK because it means that we lose that ‘hearts and minds’ argument.”

Arrowsmith suggested the danger in failing to stress other benefits to international student recruitment, such as boosting the UK’s soft power, was that the sector looked like it was perpetually “just trying to generate income”, and therefore can “be ignored a little bit”.

ߣߣ��Ƶ

Nonetheless, he stressed that the economic benefits of international students were considerable. He cited findings commissioned by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), released earlier this year, which show that every 10 international students generate £1 million worth of net economic impact for the UK economy over the duration of their studies.

He also suggested that the tension between the government’s desire to drive growth and to bring down immigration had taken root “at least in the last five or six years”, but that “those two things are very, very difficult to reconcile”.

The UUKI head was speaking as part of a panel titled “Internationalisation for profit: aligning values with necessities”. Joanna Kumpula, head of international education at Tampere University in Finland and previously international marketing manager at the Finnish National Agency for Education, said that Finland only introduced tuition fees for non-EU students in 2017, although its present government has been tightening the rules further since last year, including introducing an additional €100 (£85.87) application fee for overseas candidates.

But in a country with an ageing population, in which it is estimated there will be more university places than graduates from high school by 2030, Kumpula said many in the sector were very keen for greater international recruitment: “We need more people, talented people, people who want to live in one of the coldest but happiest nations in the world.”

ߣߣ��Ƶ

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com