Louise Richardson: Lift the siege mentality

These are difficult times, although we have all been through a great deal worse. With enduring concerns about the strength of the economy and increasing ones about national security, governments have an understandable tendency to turn inwards and to focus, perhaps too narrowly, on the economic security of their citizens. The universalism of universities, their mix of nationalities and of ideas, suggests a different response.

We have never been impervious to the politics of the times. Universities have long survived international unrest, political turmoil, revolutions, reformations and papal schisms. My own institution, the University of St Andrews, was founded 600 years ago, when it became unsafe for Scottish clerics, followers of the antipope Benedict XIII, to travel to France. The University of Oxford emerged 250 years earlier, when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. Today, we will all be impoverished if students from other countries find it too costly, too difficult or too unwelcoming to travel to the UK to attend our universities.

Far from being a drain on the economy, foreign students are major contributors. In 2011‑12, the higher education sector as a whole generated £10.7 billion in export earnings for the UK. British universities attracted more than 435,000 international students, who spent £4.9 billion on goods and services off campus and £4.4 billion on tuition fees and accommodation. Nearly 20 per cent (£13.9 billion) of the output generated by the sector, not to mention 137,000 jobs, can be attributed to the enrolment of non-European Union students.

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There is a certain irony in the fact that through the highly successful Sutton Trust Summer School Programme, low- and middle-income UK students (three-quarters of participants come from families with household incomes under £25,000) are gaining admission and financial aid – more than £9 million for 58 students this year – at top US universities. This is happening at a time when American and other foreign students are being prevented from working to pay for their studies here. In effect, poor British students are going overseas to get a “debt free” education; by contrast, only wealthy foreign students will be permitted here.

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