Brexit and UK higher education after five years: You know the answer, don’t you?
- Ludovic Highman, University of Bath
- Simon Marginson, University of Oxford
- Vassiliki Papatsiba, Cardiff University
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The research team that investigated the effects of Brexit in higher education for the ESRC in 2017-2018 returns to the topic five years after the 2016 referendum. It is now crystal clear that Brexit has weakened the close collaborative links between UK higher education institutions and their EU counterparts, with negative implications for UK resources and capacity, without leading to new global strategies and opportunities.
The most obvious effect is the sharp decline in the number of European students in UK higher education. In 2020 the UK government withdrew from the Erasmus student mobility scheme and introduced its own Turing scheme. While Erasmus had supported both the outward mobility of UK students and the inward movement of European students, Turing supports only outward mobility. In 2021-22 the cessation of UK tuition fee arrangements for EU citizens entering UK degree programmes led to a sharp drop in numbers in that category also.
The damage to research might be even more serious. Collaborative European research programmes have been crucial in building the infrastructure and network centrality of UK science and in attracting EU citizen researchers, but at the time of writing the UK’s future participation as a non-member country in Horizon Europe was unresolved. The long uncertainty about this, coupled with the cessation of free people movement after Brexit, have led to the exit of some UK-based researchers, a decline in UK researchers’ competitiveness in European grants, a fall in the number of EU doctoral students and established researchers entering the UK, and a decline in EU country citizens as a proportion of UK academic staff.
As much as all would like to find a silver lining, the fact must be faced squarely: the impact of Brexit in higher education and research has been major and totally negative. The question is what to do in future.
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Ludovic is Associate Professor in Higher Education Management at the University of Bath. Previously, he was a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), based at the University College London’s Institute of Education, and a Research Centre Associate at the University of Oxford. His teaching and research interests lie at the intersection between contemporary European studies and higher education studies. Ludovic’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, higher education policy and higher education in Europe.
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education and higher education as a public good, and higher education and social inequality. At Oxford he team teaches in the MSc Education pathway on Higher Education. Current books are Changing Higher Education in India (edited with Saumen Chattopadhyay and NV Varghese), and Changing Higher Education in East Asia (edited with Xin Xu), both published by Bloomsbury.
Vassiliki Papatsiba is a Reader in Social Sciences – Education at Cardiff University. Her research sits within Political Sociology applied to international higher education and focuses on three interrelated areas: a) Internationalisation in higher education, academic mobility and migration; b) International research collaboration, global (in)equity, and public policies; c) Universities and knowledge exchange with their international and local communities and networks. She served on the Steering Group of the Global Challenges in Higher Education and Research (GHEAR) of the World Universities Network (WUN) (2018-2022) and led the OECD’s Country Review on Knowledge Exchange in Lithuanian Universities and Research Institutes (2021). She was on the Research Management Committee of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (2018-2020) and directed the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (2017 to 2020) at the University of Sheffield. Vassiliki held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship (EIF) at the University of Oxford (2005-2008) and was a Co-Investigator in the Economic and Social Research Council funded research ‘Brexit, migration and higher education’ (Brexit Priority Project award ES/R000166/1).