The hidden cost of declining international student numbers

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This blog was kindly authored by Dr Emma Roberts, Head of Law, University of Salford’s Business School.
The decline in international student numbers is usually discussed in economic and financial terms. At institutional level, falling fee income raises concerns about course viability, cross-subsidy and sustainability. Across the wider economy, the consequences extend much further.

Recent HEPI and Kaplan research reports around 54,500 fewer international first-year students in 2024/25 than in 2022/23, a fall of 12 per cent. It estimates that, had those numbers been sustained, the net economic benefit generated by the 2024/25 cohort would have been £2.9 billion higher.

Reduced income may ultimately constrain staffing, services and the wider student experience. But there is also a distinct and more immediate educational consequence. What happens to learning when classrooms become less internationally diverse?

Recent policy debate on international students has focused heavily on recruitment, migration policy and the Graduate route. But their presence also helps shape the learning environment experienced by all students. They bring different languages, educational histories, cultural assumptions, professional expectations and lived experiences into the university. Internationally diverse classrooms can enable students to encounter different ways of thinking about knowledge, authority, responsibility, community and the wider world.

As international student numbers fall, universities therefore face not only economic and financial pressures, but a potential narrowing of the intellectual and cultural fabric of learning.

The classroom as a global space

This is especially significant for students who may never study abroad. Cost, disability and competing demands on students’ time can restrict access to overseas study, placements or exchanges. For many, the home curriculum and campus may therefore provide their main opportunity to develop global perspectives and intercultural competence, making this a curriculum as well as a recruitment challenge.

International diversity is not, in itself, a guarantee of internationalised learning. Its educational value depends on the opportunities students have for encounter, comparison, reflection and challenge. In Law, for example, students may encounter different understandings of justice, rights, regulation and the relationship between the individual, the market and the state. Similar opportunities arise across Business, Health, Education, Engineering, Social Sciences and the Arts.

Graduates enter professions and communities shaped by global interdependence, confronting challenges that do not sit neatly within national borders even when their work is locally rooted.

Universities also have civic responsibilities to communities that are themselves international, multilingual and globally connected. Internationalisation at home can support both students’ graduate development and universities’ wider role in engaging with the social, cultural and economic realities of place.

International students should not be expected to carry the burden of internationalising the curriculum. Their presence can enrich the classroom, but institutions must design meaningful internationalised learning.

Internationalisation at home

Internationalisation at home is neither a second-best alternative to mobility nor a substitute for an internationally diverse campus. Universities UK International frames it as a strategic and inclusive curriculum approach, ensuring that global and intercultural learning is not left to optional activities or cohort composition.

That means moving beyond occasional overseas examples, international weeks or guest lectures. Programme teams should ask where students encounter comparative and intercultural perspectives, examine shared problems across jurisdictions or communities, move beyond domestic frames in assessment and collaborate internationally.

It also means asking whose knowledge is centred and creating space for Global South perspectives and traditions beyond dominant Western frames. This intersects with decolonising curriculum work but retains the specific aim of helping students understand their discipline through more than one national, cultural or epistemic lens.

Internationalising curriculum design

Collaborative Online International Learning, or COIL, offers one practical model, enabling students in different countries to collaborate without travel. In legal education, students might address shared justice challenges through outputs requiring negotiation across legal, linguistic, cultural and professional assumptions.

But COIL is only one route. Virtual exchange, comparative learning, internationally focused assessment, globally connected projects, joint online seminars, international guest teaching, local-global community projects and collaboration with international charities and NGOs can all support internationalisation at home.

These approaches are strongest when aligned with programme aims and embedded through module content, learning outcomes, teaching and assessment. Their impact also depends on active learning, opportunities for connection and reflection, and the explicit development of intercultural skills.

Graduate outcomes and global competence

Graduate outcomes are also relevant here. Employers need graduates who can work across cultures, understand international contexts and respond to problems that cross national boundaries. Global competence is not simply knowledge of other countries. It involves intellectual flexibility, cultural humility, comparative reasoning, ethical awareness and an understanding that professional knowledge is shaped by context.

These capacities will not develop by accident or simply because international students are present.

The answer is not to expect recruitment to recover nor rely on international students to internationalise the university through their presence alone. International mobility remains valuable and internationally diverse campuses remain irreplaceably rich. But amid uncertainty and recruitment pressure, universities need to ensure that all students continue to encounter the wider world through their education.

The educational loss

The hidden cost is not only economic. It is also the more immediate narrowing of what students encounter through their education. Financial pressures may unfold over time, but the effects of less internationally diverse classrooms may already be taking shape.