Issue 026: EU undergraduates down 67%. The fee is not why

Brussels wants EU undergraduates to pay about £13,000 a year at English universities, the average cost of teaching a three-year undergraduate course rather than the full international fee, as part of the youth mobility deal due at the UK-EU summit on Friday 20 November. The Telegraph reported the offer on Friday 2 October (source), Wonkhe reported on Tuesday 6 October that the fee question had been set aside while the summit's outline was agreed (source), and University World News asked on Friday 16 October whether £13,000 could bring EU students back (source). The Russell Group's modelling says home fee status for EU students "would cost UK higher education institutions around £580 million" a year (source). Everyone in the argument is talking about the fee, and nobody is talking about the loan. The Spotlight tests whether the fee is what drove EU students away, against the HESA and Student Loans Company figures, and uses Eurostat to show where the students who left went.

The rest of the week was quieter. The National reported on Friday 16 October that study visa applications from Gulf nationals had fallen since 2022, with the UAE down most; the figures are in the Numbers (source).

Three things changed for an EU student starting an English degree in August 2021. The fee rose from £9,250 to the international rate. The tuition fee loan that had paid it was withdrawn for new starters. And free movement ended, so the student now needs a Student visa, the health surcharge, maintenance funds in cash and a 20-hour work limit. The £13,000 proposal touches only the first of the three, the fee, and the HESA figures say the fee did the least damage of the three: the fall was steepest in the member states whose students were least able to pay up front, with Finland the one rich exception; it was no smaller in Scotland, where EU students had paid no tuition fee at all; and the one nationality that kept the loan and free movement, the Irish, grew (source).

Ireland is the closest thing to a control we have, because nothing changed for Irish students. Under the Common Travel Area an Irish student at an English university pays the home fee, and Student Finance England's guidance says an Irish citizen with three years' residence can take the same tuition fee loan as an English one (source). Where nothing changed, the numbers did not change either: HESA counts 2,200 Irish first-degree students at English universities in 2020/21 and 2,315 in 2024/25, while every other EU nationality at English universities fell from 84,815 to 26,265, a fall of 69%. The UK-wide Irish rise of 26% is mostly at Northern Ireland's two universities, where the fee is £4,750; at Scottish universities, where Irish students went from free tuition to the £9,250 rest-of-UK fee, they fell from 1,530 to 630. The fee decides which UK university a student picks; the loan decides whether the UK is in the running at all.

Scotland adds a second test. Before 2021 EU students paid no tuition fees in Scotland, where the Scottish government paid them, and borrowed the £9,250 fee in England, so in both countries the student paid nothing at the start of the course. From August 2021 both paid the international fee in cash. Scotland lost 70% of its EU first-degree students and England 67% (source). Both lost the same share, which is what you would expect if what was paid at the start of the course, not the fee itself, decided it. Two academics argued in Times Higher Education on Monday 2 February 2026 that a fee of up to £15,000 would restore Scottish demand (source); the figures say the students who left were not choosing between a free degree and a £15,000 one, but between a fee they could borrow and one they could not.

Student Finance England paid £517 million in tuition fee loans on behalf of EU undergraduates in the financial year 2020-21, the last full year before new EU students lost eligibility. The chart falls in steps rather than at once because a student who started by 2020/21 stayed funded to the end of the course, so the £111 million of 2024-25 is the tail of those cohorts (source). EU borrowers owed £5.8 billion at 31 March 2025, and of the £5.2 billion due for repayment, £1.0 billion was on accounts in arrears, 19%. HESA's entrant figures by level are consistent with this: undergraduates fell 67%, taught postgraduates 47% (source).

Market mix is also a factor in which universities kept their EU students. The table groups 68 universities with 200 or more EU undergraduate entrants in 2020/21 by the share of their EU students who came from the eleven central and eastern European member states (source).

A university that recruited 20% or less of its EU students from the eleven countries lost 60% of its EU undergraduate entrants; one that drew over 60% lost 96%. Bedfordshire went from 1,525 EU undergraduate entrants to 25, Suffolk from 620 to 5 and West London from 1,295 to 40, with 58% to 90% of their EU students from the eleven countries. They recruited the students the loan made it possible to recruit, and lost them when the loan ended. At the other end, St Andrews lost 9%, Oxford 38%, LSE 43% and Cambridge 51%, whose EU intakes are western and northern European and whose fees are the highest in the sector. The universities with the smallest shares from the eleven countries are mostly high-tariff ones, so these figures cannot fully separate market mix from reputation.

Price gives a weaker answer. We found eight universities whose own fee pages charge EU undergraduates less than the international fee for 2026/27 entry, and there may be others. Seven of the eight lost 72% to 95% of their EU undergraduate entrants, no better than the sector (source). Portsmouth, at £10,300, is the one case where a lower fee visibly held numbers: 410 entrants to 255, a fall of 38%. London Metropolitan had almost the same market mix, 38% from the eleven countries against Portsmouth's 39%, a lower fee still, and lost 74%. Something other than price or mix decided it: international strategy, agent networks, local living costs and market positioning all differ between the two, and the HESA figures cannot separate them. The Russell Group's 58% fall against 71% for the rest of the sector fits the same pattern: a lower fee retained some students who could have paid the full one, and did nothing for students who needed a loan.

For comparison, an EU undergraduate at home pays a student contribution of €2,500 (about £2,160) in Ireland from September 2026, a statutory fee of €2,694 (about £2,330) in the Netherlands, no tuition fee at a German public university and €178 (about £155) for a French licence (source).

The students the UK lost mostly did not turn up anywhere else in the EU. The UK had 150,580 EU students in 2020/21 and 62,520 in 2024/25, 88,060 fewer (source), and Eurostat counts the students from each EU country who are studying in another EU country, so it shows whether those students went elsewhere (source). Compared with 2020/21, there were 10,440 fewer Romanian students in the UK in 2024/25 and 2,343 more in other EU countries; 8,355 fewer Polish students in the UK and 1,146 more elsewhere; 4,810 fewer Bulgarian students in the UK and 1,334 fewer elsewhere. Eurostat has no Dutch figures by origin, but Nuffic's own count fills the gap (source): Romanian students at Dutch universities rose from 5,629 to 7,659 between 2021 and 2025 and Polish from 3,548 to 5,961. Even with the Netherlands added, the rise elsewhere in Europe is 42% of the UK fall for Romania and 43% for Poland.

The pattern is different for the western countries. There were 5,490 fewer German students in the UK and 14,449 more elsewhere in the EU, most of them in Austria, where German enrolments rose from 30,503 to 41,142. French students went mainly to Spain and Portugal, Italian students to France. Those students pay a few hundred euros a year or nothing, and a lower UK fee competes for them.

A £13,000 fee would make a three-year degree cost £39,000 up front, against £29,370 at the home rate of £9,790 or £30,000 to £114,000 at international rates, and it is £683 a year above the £12,317 that an undergraduate year cost to teach in 2023/24, the Issue 22 figure from KPMG's study for the Department for Education (source). For a student from Munich or Milan who can pay international fees, it is a discount. For the student from Bucharest who came on the loan, it is £39,000 to find before the course starts. The first group fell by 49% to 54% when the loan went. The second fell by 80% to 91%, and most of them did not go to another EU country instead.

The case for EU students is not only income. Janet Ilieva of Education Insight told University World News on Friday 16 October that rebuilding EU numbers "would reduce dependence on a narrow range of countries, including markets with higher observed visa-refusal rates", and "should be welcomed by higher education leaders worried about the dangers of not meeting the new tighter BCA targets" (source). An EU student who can pay £13,000 up front is a low-refusal, low-compliance-risk student at a time when the Basic Compliance Assessment refusal threshold is moving to 5%, and that market is worth competing for even at 62,520 students against 150,580. Anne-Marie Graham, formerly of UKCISA, gave the other side in the same piece: £13,000 "would still be more expensive than most of our EU counterparts".

Who the students would go to is largely decided already. The universities that kept the most EU students after 2021 are the ones whose EU intake was western and northern European before 2021, and that mix was set by ranking, location and long-standing relationships with schools and agents, not by the fee. A university whose EU recruitment was built in Romania and Poland cannot move it to Germany and France by changing a price, any more than it can swap Nigeria for China. If the fee comes down, the universities that gain will mostly be the ones that already recruit the students a lower fee can reach.

The figures have three limits. The HESA figures by country are total first-degree enrolments rather than entrants, because HESA does not publish entrants by country, so the 2024/25 figures still carry a few students who started on the loan and understate the fall. Irish students have other reasons to cross the border that did not change in 2021. The SLC series is by financial year and covers England only.

Things to think about this week

The EU undergraduate market was built on a loan and on free movement. Brussels is negotiating over the fee, and neither side has offered the loan back. Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute wrote on Sunday 18 May 2025 that any deal is "presumably" about fees alone, which would limit access "to those EU students with access to enough upfront cash to pay both their tuition" and living costs (source). The HESA figures say he was describing the students who have already gone.

There are two EU markets to plan for, and only one of them is being negotiated over. The market that existed before 2021 ran on £517 million a year of public lending and on the right to work without a visa, and a lower fee does not bring it back. The market of 2024/25 is 41% of the size, concentrated in the richer member states, and it responds to price. The summit on Friday 20 November will say whether the fee moves for that market.

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