UK institutions looking at the latest study visa application figures will “hear the footsteps of their creditors outside”, one observer has warned.

�ճ���� – which shows a stark drop in the number of people seeking sponsored study visas in August – is sending shockwaves through UK higher education, with some warning of university closures should the trend continue.

August is the peak month for applications, ahead of the beginning of the new academic year. Applications for study visas rose modestly year-on-year in the same month last year, but have fallen again in 2026, down 16 per cent on August 2025.

Critics attribute the situation to the 2023 ban on most international students bringing their dependants, as well as the coming imposition of the international student levy.

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“This figure actually could have been worse, but the long-term picture is still pretty bleak,” said Glen O’Hara, professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University and someone who frequently warns about the financial peril facing UK universities.

“There shouldn’t be any doubt that this will harm delivery of everything universities do across the board, and a small number of institutions reading this news will hear the footsteps of their creditors outside.”

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Jenny Phillimore, professor of migration and superdiversity at the University of Birmingham, said another part of the problem was the UK’s policy of including students in net migration figures. Hence, policies to reduce their number is seen “as a way of reducing net migration”.

However the latest application figures amount to “a massive loss for UK institutions, who rely so heavily on overseas students”, she continued. “Some may well go under as a result.”

According to the University of Oxford, net migration to the UK, the difference between immigration and emigration, fell to 171,000 in 2025. That was down 48 per cent on the year prior.

Net migration had reached record levels after Brexit, rising to 944,000 in the year ending 31 March 2023.

On becoming the UK’s fifth prime minister in four years, Andy Burnham signalled to the public he would hold firm to Labour’s previous pledges on immigration by keeping on home secretary Shabana Mahmood, seen as a hardliner on immigration, even as he removed others who had served as senior Cabinet ministers under Keir Starmer.

For Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, those wider Cabinet shifts could prove consequential in the context of the study visa application numbers.

“I’m not sure we should panic, because there’s a general trend towards [students] making decisions later [on studying abroad],” he cautioned. “[But] clearly it is worrying because international students continue to be the one and only thing that makes a significant surplus in higher education.” And he worried that new ministers such as education secretary Lucy Powell and science minister Chris McDonald “may not recognise the full significance of this”.

Sally Wheeler, vice-chancellor of Birkbeck, University of London, told ߣߣ��Ƶ she was “not surprised” by the data.

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“[The government has] created a series of policy settings which are pointing towards that,” she said. But she didn’t think visa policy was the only driver. “Cost of living in the UK [also] has something to do with it,” she said. “You have to look at other countries as well, because they’re becoming more competitive. [And] universities in our original source countries [for international student recruitment] are improving rapidly.”

Nevertheless, Wheeler said, the increasing prevalence of English language teaching in other countries, as well as the expansion in transnational education (TNE), “wouldn’t account for this drop: it is primarily due to policy settings”.

“I think that’s a huge shame,” she said. “It’s a huge missed opportunity for soft power.”

Steve Smith, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter and the UK’s current international education champion, was less concerned. He said the government was very much in favour of actively encouraging responsible international student recruitment, and he was doubtful that the downturn in international student numbers would cause an institution to close.

“I think ultimately you’ll see institutions change their size and their shape. They’ll grow, they’ll decline,” he said.

“International student numbers are rarely so big that [declines] are threatening to the [future] of an institution. But I’m not going to lie or mislead: if international student numbers fall, it will impact on the provision of staffing levels and things like that, which is why there is this across the government agreement that we’re happy for international students to come. We want to promote them coming.”

Smith echoed Wheeler’s point that the downturn in visa applications could be attributed to the fact other parts of the world are becoming more “competitive”, with students increasingly looking to study in their home countries or neighbouring ones, rather than the UK.

“The dominant reason is a demand-related reason,” he said. “That sounds like a truism. But if you look at the reductions, quite a lot of them…are going on across the sector, including for high-ranking institutions. I don’t think it’s simply: ‘Oh, UK Visas and Immigration has done this,” he said, adding that international student numbers are also declining in the US, Canada and ߣߣ��Ƶ – although those countries, too, have tightened their visa regimes.

Others in the sector remain less forgiving of UK immigration policy, however.

“We as a country have become increasingly hostile to overseas students,” Birmingham’s Phillimore said. “Just getting the visa is so difficult and expensive…This is a huge problem for British universities.”

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georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com