Number of Indian students coming to UK declines for the first time

The number of Indian students coming to the UK for higher studies fell by 24% - the most dramatic decrease among the foreign student category, according to figures released by the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)

The number of Sri Lankan and Pakistani students coming to the UK also decreased by 14% and 13% respectively. The UK also experienced a decline in students coming from other Asian and Far East countries such as Philippines (fell by 23%), Japan (by 3%), Kazakhstan (by 7%), Bangladesh (by 6%) and Taiwan by 5%.

But the UK’s HEIs experienced a surge in students coming from China (by 17%), Singapore (19%), Vietnam (18%), Brunei (13%), and Malaysia by 5%.

Overall, there were nearly 2.5 million students in higher education in the UK in 2011/12. Of these just over 2 million (82.6%) were UK domicile students, 132,550 (5.3%) were from other EU member countries and 302,680 (12.1%) were from non-EU countries, predominantly from Asia.

Overall, students from China and India still accounted for over 35% of all non-EU domicile students in the UK.

However, an increasing number of Indian families are considering non-UK locations such as the US, Australia or Canada for higher education in the wake of complex visa regulations in the UK as well as last year’s development of the Home Office stripping London Metropolitan University of its visa licensing status..

The total number of students fell by just 0.2% mainly because of a lower numbers of UK domiciled students (-0.6%), HESA said.

Among the EU countries, the number of students coming from Poland, Ireland, France and Germany fell by 14.1%, 10.5%, 3.7% and 1.7% respectively. But the number of students from Romania and Bulgaria rose by 27.9% and 23.7%