Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once observed that “we are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything even resembling a proposal on how to systemically fix this.” This stark contrast is increasingly relevant in the face of a proposed 6% government levy on international student tuition fees, which currently range from £37,380 to £62,820 annually, to supposedly increase funds for maintenance grants. We need to ask: is this the right mechanism for supporting domestic students? Or is it a more palatable xenophobia under the guise of helping home students?
English higher‐education institutions currently receive over £10 billion a year in international-student fees income, meaning this levy could cost universities in the region of £620 million annually, with Oxford alone owing around £17 million each year. These not insubstantial numbers mean that the University must either choose to absorb the tax or pass it onto students, the latter being frequently criticised as an unsustainable solution. As someone already subject to the whims of international tuition prices, behind the rhetoric of helping home students lies a deeper issue – one that exposes the corruption baked into tuition-based university funding itself.
International students, who already pay triple what their domestic peers do, are being cast as convenient cash cows. The government claims the levy will strengthen the “skills system” and widen access. Yet, as the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) notes, there’s no clear mechanism ensuring that the funds will ever return to universities or benefit students directly. It’s a familiar sleight of hand: siphon from higher education, promise reform, deliver austerity.
The UK is, in effect, inching toward the American model, one that I sought to escape because of how it commodifies learning and rewards compliance over inquiry. Even as an American in Oxford, my tuition costs significantly less than it would have had I attended a comparable private university in the US. There, decades of tuition inflation have created an education market where universities increasingly serve donors and political interests rather than students. When American campuses faced pressure over the Gaza conflict, several capitulated to congressional threats, disciplining students and staff for pro-Palestinian speech to preserve federal funding. The corrosion is moral as well as financial. Once education depends on market logic, intellectual freedom becomes a negotiable asset.
Oxford, for all its prestige, is not immune. The University’s cautious statements around Palestine have surely been at least partly influenced by financial pressures. If this levy passes, it will not be the well-heeled international truly paying the price, however, but those who seek refuge through education and are now being priced out. Not only may the University feel compelled to admit more international students to cope with the levy, but they will be needing to admit a certain kind of international student – one who can comfortably pay their way through these new fees.
There is an even more uncomfortable part of this to grapple with, namely that many of these students hailing from less prosperous countries for the famed Oxford education are doing so because their own universities were stripped of prestige and money as a result of centuries of colonial enterprise. To then continue to profit from their past exploitation in the form of skyrocketing tuition is doubly ironic.
Not only does the levy assume that international students come from a homogeneously privileged background, it is also not exactly forthcoming about the actual steps being taken to benefit UK students. The White Paper only states that the money from the levy will be “reinvested into the higher education and skills system”, but does not offer specifics as to how or when this will take place.
Across the UK, 19% of university students are international and at Oxford, that figure jumps to around 43%. Instead of siphoning for the very students keeping universities afloat, the government should establish a contribution system where domestic and international graduates alike pay back through earning rather than upfront fees. This approach would protect the international character that defines universities like Oxford.
Instead, the government’s proposed levy sends the opposite message: that global students are little more than cash cows, to be taxed when convenient and thanked when silent. It’s a move that imperils not only financial stability but also moral credibility.
