[cmacleod4]

UK universities should be rolling out the red carpet for all the great students who the USA no longer want. Unfortunately our government seems more interested in pandering to the bigots who think "more foreigners == bad". :-(

[gambiting]

UK universities did their own student exodus move with brexit, I'm still friends with several professors of Russel group universities and they all say the same thing - after Brexit the number of MSc and PhD level students have collapsed and not recovered anywhere since. UK is in for a very rude awakening in a few years where its position as a superpower in research starts to dwindle. And to add on top of it - the universities are now cramming as many international(non-EU) students as possible, because they pay ridiculous fees that support school coffers - lecturers are more or less directly told they are not allowed to fail those students in any way almost no matter the transgression because they are the main source of income for universities.

[einszwei]

The conversation in UK media and the ruling class consensus has shifted so far to the right on immigration that it would be a miracle if UK continues to see similar levels of foreign student enrolment in future.

[ben_w]

Weirdly, despite all that, migration to the UK was a record high this time last year, and although it has reduced a bit since then it remains massively higher than before Brexit — see graph half way down the article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89pvd58nd3o

[einszwei]

The student enrollments had already started going down last year. 2023 was the peak. From the article you linked:

> According to separate Home Office figures, 393,125 student visas were issued to foreign students in the year ending December 2024.

> That is 14% fewer than in the previous 12-month period, but still almost 50% higher (46%) than in 2019.

So a 14% decrease between 2023 and 2024. I am willing to bet this will go down further this year.

The post-brexit surge in international students was driven by UK universities leaning on foreign students to fill their financial hole. The fees for domestic students will start to go up now that foreign student enrollments are declining.

[nssnsjsjsjs]

What about Australia! Nope also reducing foreign student numbers.

Maybe China can become the destination for ambitious smart people.

There is a big opportunity to pull in brain power for any country who wants it and can offer the follow on career.

[ben_w]

> Maybe China can become the destination for ambitious smart people.

Don't underestimate the language barrier. All those stereotypes about Chinese people mixing Rs and Ls? That works both ways, not just tongue twisters like Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den*, but even "Hello": https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=“你好”%20%2F%...

And machine translation is currently so bad, that the last few time I tried giving an example here, people who actually speak Chinese would respond with something along the lines of "I have no idea what you tried to write, that is nonsensical".

* https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4&pp=ygUhTGlvbi1FYXR...

[int_19h]

> And machine translation is currently so bad, that the last few time I tried giving an example here, people who actually speak Chinese would respond with something along the lines of "I have no idea what you tried to write, that is nonsensical".

Have you tried LLMs for that?

[ben_w]

Yes, and not just in the well-technically sense of Google Translate being a Transformer model.

[tbrownaw]

Hasn't the UK been jailing people for sending mean tweets? That seems a bit beyond refusing entry.

[ben_w]

If you mean this one: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/why-was-lucy-connolly-...

Then no, she was jailed for calling for incitement to commit crimes.

If you mean this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial

Then I'd say essentially yes, despite it being a fine and not imprisonment and getting quashed later anyway, because most of us aren't lawyers and won't care about that kind of distinction — and that goes double for students on a visa.

[AlecSchueler]

So it happened but only if you don't care about the distinction between fact and fiction.

[ben_w]

Closer to the opposite, it happens more when we do care about the distinction.

[Edit: Just realised the "you" in your comment can either be the poster or the police, with very different consequences.]

The rules are something that looks like a credible threat.

Both these, at the time of the conviction, did look credible.

The second was only overturned because enough people argued well enough that it wasn't credible and shouldn't have ever been seen as credible. The rules were then changed to emphasise the arguments people had made so this didn't happen again.