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On 24 June, universities minister Michelle Donelan announced that, as a consequence of Brexit, EU and EEA students would be classified as overseas students starting from the 2021/22 academic year. They will be charged full tuition (up to £20,000 in some cases), lose access to the tuition fee loan, and no longer be eligible for many needs-based funds. It signalled the end of a brief period of time when it seemed UK universities could serve international social and academic mobility.
“EU … students, staff and researchers make an important contribution to our universities,” Donelan’s statement read. “I want that contribution to continue and am confident – given the world-leading quality of our higher education sector – that it will.” As anyone coming from an average family from Poland, Romania or Hungary could tell, this statement ignores the material reality of the situations most of us studying in the UK come from.
For a year I worked as access officer of the Cambridge University Hungarian Society. Together with fellow members I gave introductory speeches in schools and mentored school students, many of whom ended up at Cambridge. While many struggled to believe that they stood a chance, Hungarian students performed staggeringly well getting into the UK’s top universities.
A key selling point for many applicants was the realisation that studying in the UK was a lot more affordable than they had imagined. This was enabled by the combination of home fee status, access to needs-based bursaries and the tuition fee loan. But a quick glance at average income levels in Hungary and international tuition fees in some UK universities makes it clear that the new arrangement changes everything.
This is not only a personal setback for poorer students but an issue of international academic justice. Top UK universities occupy central, powerful positions in attracting leading scholars and defining global research agendas of the world. It would be comforting to think that groundbreaking research only requires brilliant minds, but reality proves otherwise.
Wealth and prestige within an intensely hierarchical global academic system is crucial. Oxbridge and the Russell Group (along with the Ivy League in the US and a few leading European institutions) achieved their positions in global networks of research and knowledge in large part because of the material, financial and intellectual capital they accumulated over centuries. They vastly benefitted from their host nations’ colonial expansion, imperialism, and exploitation of waged and slave labour.
As a result, world-leading academic research is unequally concentrated. It is produced only through significant material and financial investment, which poorer countries simply cannot afford. This arrangement was described by scholar Syed Farid Alatas as “academic imperialism” – the hegemony of institutions in economically developed countries that dictate global research agendas, partnerships, the allocation of funds and the division of academic labour.
That participation in these institutions was reserved to nationally based economic and social elites also meant that knowledge, imperial power and education formed an impenetrable complex for most of their history. Domestically, it is through comparatively recent changes that university was made more-or-less open to working class people, women and ethnic minorities. Still, systemic racism, sexism and economic inequality continue to disadvantage students of these backgrounds. Reforms have never been implemented voluntarily – they are the result of prolonged and organised social struggle.
On the other hand, universities have for centuries been key agents of international mobility for scholars of Europe’s economic periphery. From the 17th century, many eastern European students sought to study in western Europe’s old universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. However, this sort of mobility was generally reserved for the already privileged. The brief period between the EU extension of 2004 and Brexit allowed for some inter-class, as well as international mobility.
The minister is right to say that the “world-leading quality” of British higher education will keep attracting students from all over the world and Europe. However, fewer can now afford it, and those who can will be members of established elites. The result can only lead to further exclusion in a university system that is already struggling with establishing and handling diversity.
Of course, a system that includes EU students but excludes the rest of the world is already deeply unfair; a real solution should find a way to give a chance for talented students from all over the world to study affordably at the academic centres at the top of global hierarchies. But this shouldn’t stop us from recognising that the government’s latest step was in the wrong direction. It has contributed not only to a more isolated world, but a less equal one.
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