Foreign students funding

[SuperSue77]

Can international students studying at UK unis get loans from UK govt for their funding? I had assumed they had to pay upfront, but something I have seen on social media suggests otherwise.

I'm just reading what was in the article. I'm not sure how either. 20% of the non payers are Romanian. The highest single ethnicity.

It’s 0.1% of the total lent each year. It’s a drop in the ocean. There is a lot more abuse of loans by UK students than overseas nationals. That won’t fit your scummy cheating foreigner narrative though.

Presumably this dates from when we were in the EU then. Ask yourself why the Telegraph is dredging up stuff about an old pre-Brexit system that no longer operates.

Thanks, to be clear this was actually a hypothetical, albeit one I thought would be more common via,say UK students studying in the US and wanting to return for a master's to e.g. ease them in to the local job market.

Article here in the Times a few days ago;

About one in five student loans are now being given to non-British citizens, which risks costing the taxpayer billions of pounds a year in unpaid debt.

Research has found that in the past year foreign students received about £4 billion in tuition fees and maintenance loans, about 20 per cent of the total lending under the scheme.

The vast majority went to EU citizens, with one in 20 of all first-time student loans going to Romanians alone, amid concerns within the government that the scheme is open to fraud...

Conservative MP Neil O’Brien .. said he was concerned that the post-Brexit [settlement] scheme was being exploited. He said that despite the deadline to apply for settled status passing five years ago, the Home Office was continuing to grant late applications.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/student-loans-eu-citizens-settled-status-xsxj3s3xp

People who aren’t british citizens do live in the UK, were you not already aware of that?

Perhaps you should write to the Times and let them know.

Out of interest, did you click on Show more and read all of my post? Apparently a new feature on Mumsnet.

Indeed. It is only right that settled persons receive tuition loans. By living in the UK they have forfeited the rights associated with being ordinarily resident in their home countries.

Settled persons ordinarily have all the rights of citizens except voting rights. In the modern history of the UK, it is only within the last year that one party with very few MPs - and four current Met criminal investigations into donations around its 2024 election campaign, which it is frantically trying to distract from - has proposed to vary this principle. Ultimately by doing away with settled status.

Also this -
Protecting Public Money in Higher Education
Statement made on 25 March 2025
Bridget Phillipson

Earlier this month, I was made aware that there is a disproportionately large number of Romanian students settled in the UK who receive student funding from the Student Loans Company. Investigative work undertaken by the Student Loans Company suggests organised exploitation both of Romanian students and of the UK taxpayer.

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2025-03-25/hcws547

Why? It’s in your and the Times’ interest to keep quiet about that as it doesn’t suit their and your anti-immigrant narrative. How on earth do you think I, as a general member of the public is going to persuade the Times to be more balanced journalistically.?

Oh dear, someone hasn’t kept up with the thread. Already dealt with

I think those who are saying this doesn’t happen are being a little naive.

There was a story in The Times on this a few days ago. Key points:

Foreign students received about £4bn worth of loans for tuition fees and maintenance last year - almost 20% of total lending. 5% of all first time student loans goes to Romanians.

EU citizens with settled status have access to student finance. The deadline for applying for settled status was 5 years ago but for some reason the Home Office is still granting late applications and 66,000 new applicants gained residency in the last year.

In the last 10 years the percentage of student loans being given to non-UK students has increased from 10.2% to 19.3%.

Foreign students are 25% less likely to repay their loans than their British counterparts.

There is also an article on today’s Sunday Times that says that the Student Loans Company spent £1.8m on external debt agencies in the first 6 months of this year to chase up debt from those with student loans now living and working abroad (some of whom are British and some of whom aren’t). It has spent £11.3m on this since 2021. Graduates who work abroad are supposed to inform the SLC of their move and income details and are responsible for making repayments. Evidently a lot of them don’t as in 2024-25 the SLC recovered £7.7m from non-compliant overseas borrowers.

There is also an article by a Bulgarian national living in Bulgaria who is paying back her student loan, but says that many of her friends with student loans are managing to find loopholes so that they don’t have to repay.

There are apparently around 370,000 overseas graduates owing nearly £13bn who the SLC has admitted losing track of.

Settled persons ordinarily have all the rights of citizens except voting rights.

That's not correct - settled persons are restricted on how many (consecutive) years they can stay outside the UK without returning (2 years ILR, 5 years EUSS...) and their status can be revoked, if for example they commit a serious crime or become a threat to society.

I am an EU national who took out a student finance loan for my fees over a decade ago, so before Brexit.

While it is true that many EU students used to find ways to cheat the system once they went back after their studies, it is incredibly difficult to do this today - if you want to still keep your right to enter the UK in the future, that is.

After living in the UK for a while, I moved back to the EU and every year without fail, SFE contact me asking for updated contact and employment details. They send letters, emails and call you on the phone. They have even contacted my parents, the one time I genuinely did not receive a letter as I was moving house.

Every year I must send proof of address, proof of employment (or further studies, maternity etc) and they assess it over a couple of months and recalculate my minimum monthly repayments. Since gaining employment in the EU, I have been paying £200-300 a month to SFE, which is a much larger amount than would be retained from my paycheck in the UK, thanks to the way they calculate repayments for overseas workers…

I have always been transparent because 1) I still travel to the UK regularly for adhoc work and 2) still hold status under the settlement scheme. If I weren’t honest and made my repayments on time, those privileges could obviously be revoked.

Last year, the UK brought in the pre-travel electronic authorisation, which is linked to your passport etc, so I assume all those EU students using loopholes and disappearing “off the face of the earth” are happy to never travel to the UK again. They would be flagged at the point of entry or not issued a visa / eta, if they appeared on the system as ignoring their legal repayment obligation which they entered into when signing the loan agreement.

My post was in reply to Simonjt's somewhat sarcastic post to me - I was obviously being tongue-in-cheek.

There are apparently around 370,000 overseas graduates owing nearly £13bn who the SLC has admitted losing track of.

To be fair, SLC are rubbish and it would be fairly simple to ignore their reminders. They need to link up their systems with those of the Border Police, and catch all those people out when they are travelling to or from the UK. Most of them still do, even if it is for transit to another country.

I said ‘ordinarily’. The reasonable caveats you mention are the main ones, and similar to those of peer countries.

I write as someone with settled status.

Someone else has quoted Bridget Phillipson? I thought you were disparaging sources as too right-wing?

Okay. The Times article is behind a paywall, but I have seen a summary.

There is a real problem snd it does seem to involve a disproportionate number of settled Romanians, but they are not its core.

The heart of the problem is ^franchise colleges*! with bad values, lax bookkeeping or both. A franchise college seems to be a private college associated to a university, in practice usually post 1992. It offers courses and degrees validated by the university. Quality, control and oversight vary enormously. When these are lax the potential for both academic and financial fraud is high.

At least four post 1992 universities are named in the Times article as oversight universities to franchise colleges perpetrating major fraud involving Romanians. The major problem lies in the shoddy practices of the franchise colleges that perpetrate the fraud and the universities that provide lax oversight of them.

The Romanians and other students who benefit are not blameless, but they are not the major fraudsters here.

PS All franchise colleges should not be tarnished. The summary I read discussed how some which provide solid courses for the Forces and for mature students are very angry about all of this.

The reasonable caveats

Most people would probably not know what the reasonable caveats are, plus time spent outside of the UK is also relevant to this discussion.

Over the weekend I saw an article stating foreign students with settled status can get student loans and they are apparently 25 percent more likely to skip back overseas and not repay the loan.

No, I’m on the web version so for the moment the whole post is still visible, rather than just a small bit of it.

To be awarded settled status, you need a minimum of 5 years continuous residency in the UK. That’s not someone who’s just walked into the country and decided to take out a loan to study. The vast majority of those individuals are settled there, have studied or lived in the country and have family and friends, and a life.

I would say that makes them more unlikely to up and leave immediately after their studies - at the end of the degree they’d have been living in the UK for a minimum of 8-9 years.