Student mobility after Brexit – UK in a changing Europe

Rachel Brooks looks at the key trends in student mobility post-Brexit and the lessons the UK should take now that it has decided to rejoin the EU’s Erasmus programme as part of its UK-EU reset. 

We know that, as part of the UK’s ‘reset’ with the European Union, it will rejoin the European Union’s Erasmus programme in 2027. However, the future of student mobility more generally remains unclear. This has been illustrated well in recent weeks. Despite reports that the UK would no longer insist on a ‘hard cap’ on the number of participants in the UK-EU youth mobility scheme that is currently being negotiated (instead offering a reviewable ‘balancing mechanism’ which could see the cap on numbers go up or down over time), Keir Starmer has provided few details about what this scheme could look like.

A key issue for UK universities is whether EU nationals will be able to take up UK university places under the scheme and, if so, whether they will return to paying ‘home’ fees, rather than the much higher fees they have paid, post-Brexit, as ‘international’ students. Financial modelling, conducted by the Russell Group, suggests that such a change would cost the sector around £580 million. There is also uncertainty about whether the return of Erasmus will mean an end to the student mobility schemes that have grown up in its place – namely, the Turing Scheme, which covers the whole of the UK, and Wales’ Taith programme.

At this juncture, it is perhaps useful to look back at the past decade, assess the impact of Brexit on international student mobility, and identify lessons that can be learned for the future. Research I have conducted with Johanna Waters, suggests that the impact has been substantial.

First, with respect to whole-degree mobilities (i.e. where students go abroad to study for the whole of an undergraduate or postgraduate degree), the number of incoming students from the EU declined substantially (from almost 153,000 in 2020-21 to 120,140 in 2021-22) following post-Brexit changes to their status (and has fallen further since). In the 2021-22 academic year, their fee status altered from being the same as ‘home’ students, to ‘international’ – resulting in a very significant increase in costs (tuition fees for undergraduate courses currently vary between £11,400 and £38,000). Alongside this, they became liable for paying visa costs and the NHS surcharge. It is notable that the decline in numbers did not follow immediately after the Brexit vote (in 2016), or even after the UK had formally left the EU (in 2020), but only after the financial changes came into effect.

It is also notable that the efforts of UK universities had relatively little impact – many, for example, initially offered fee waivers for EU students, as well as, in some cases, displaying very pro-EU imagery on their websites (we came across a few examples of the EU flag being displayed prominently on webpages for prospective international students, for example).

The number of UK students moving abroad for the whole of a degree did not change in the same way – remaining relatively stable over the past decade. This is perhaps unsurprising given that very few UK students study abroad for the entirety of a degree anyway (particularly in Europe), and those that do so are unlikely to have been severely disadvantaged by the financial changes wrought by Brexit: although they now have to pay ‘international’ fees in Europe, these are typically less than the ‘home’ fees they would have paid in the UK.

Second, in relation to stays abroad of shorter duration, the impact of Brexit has also been significant. The Turing Scheme, introduced as the UK’s alternative to Erasmus, has facilitated short-term mobility to a wider range of locations, beyond mainland Europe. Indeed, this was a key aim of the scheme, associated with the post-Brexit discourse of ‘Global Britain’. While some of the international office staff we have interviewed for our research believed that this had had the effect of weakening relations with European partners, others valued the increased diversity of options now available to students.

The Turing Scheme and Taith have also had some success in widening participation in such mobility. This has been due to government and universities making wider access an explicit aim of the scheme, and also because of the introduction of very short-term mobilities – initially with a minimum duration of four weeks, and recently reduced to two weeks. There are important questions about whether such short-term periods abroad can bring about the same benefits as longer stays of a semester or two, traditionally associated with Erasmus. Nevertheless, those working in university international offices have typically been very supportive of this particular change.

The shift to Turing has not been entirely positive, however. Unlike Erasmus, the scheme has funded only outgoing student mobilities, not those of students coming into the UK. Taith, however, has funded such reciprocal movement. This has been to the detriment of UK classrooms, which have traditionally benefitted from the perspectives of visiting Europeans. Moreover, the lack of certainty about whether the scheme would continue year-on-year, alongside the very late notification to universities about their annual awards from the scheme, have made institutional planning very hard.

This, in turn, has affected student participation, those we interviewed explained. Those from traditionally under-represented backgrounds often need plenty of notice of such opportunities to, for example, put alternative childcare plans in place and/or make arrangements for a period of leave from part-time work. Such students are also more likely to need their grants paid in advance – which has not always been possible, given the delays in making the awards to universities.

For these reasons, as well as the broader political significance, the UK government’s decision to rejoin Erasmus has been broadly welcomed across the higher education sector. However, our research points to some important messages from the Turing/Taith experience(s) that the Erasmus programme may do well to heed. Placing the aim of widening participation centre stage, and holding institutions accountable for this, appears to have paid dividends, as does allowing institutions the freedom to try out different models of mobility, particularly those of considerably shorter duration.

By Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education and Fellow of Linacre College, University of Oxford.