Starmer's parting shot is to give EU students a £30k discount of their uni fees.

[caringcarer]

This is a kick in the teeth to our own students. If he has money to discount off uni fees for students he should discount our own students. It's an outrage.

I am a lecturer at a university popular with international students and all my European students have more or less disappeared in the last five years. Last year, I had one student from Europe, this year, zero. I think it's good to have a bit more international diversity brought into the classrooms as students from 3-4 countries heavily dominate the classroom. I don't think this is good for higher education in general, as different nationalities bring in different perspectives and diversity of thought. At the moment it's an echo chamber.

Hopefully the universities can financially survive this though.

@titchy but if you have more students than ever before and 54% of them will not pay back their loans, surely it is the tax payer who will end up footing that bill?

I'm too busy for a discussion, but just to point out that your percentage calculations do not make sense/add up - did you mean to calculate 44% instead of 54%? And presumably those graduates not repaying their loans in full might pay some off?

The Freedom of Information Request regarding £50 million of EU student debt appears to be from 2013.

The overall EU borrowers’ balance for student loans is £6.0 billion 2025-26.

And according to this article;

Thousands of students from European countries who took out loans worth £893 million to fund degrees in UK universities have vanished without repaying a penny, write Matt Davis and Lydia Veljanovski for the Daily Mail. .

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260618155002590

To clarify - you have calculated 54% - perhaps you meant to calculate 44%.

@clarinova you are right, my percentages don't add up! However, the overall point still stands, there is fuck tonne (mathematical and technical term) of debt owed by UK graduates (given that the total stands at £295 billion as of March 2026) a lot of which seems unlikely to be repaid, if the Govt anticipates that only 56% of loans will be repaid fully. Surely, all of this unpaid debt will be met by UK tax payers in the end?

Like I said earlier, I really hope that they pursue the international debt too, but it is very, very significantly less than our own home grown unpaid debt.

The original system was predicated on 70% RAB. Fees have not gone up with inflation, so any extra students have not in real terms cost the tax payer any more than they would under the old system where the grant (ie what fees have replaced) would have gone up with inflation.

And if UK taxpayers end up paying the money back, what's the problem with that? Isn't that exactly what taxes are for?

If you want to be completely independent of government support, then be prepared to pay for your own or your children's education out of your own pocket. That means years of saving every spare penny—which, by the way, is exactly what many parents of international students do.

I'd also bet that most UK families don't have savings set aside to cover their children's university fees. They rely on the government-backed student finance system instead.

So criticizing others for using it is a bit hypocritical.

Like I said earlier, I really hope that they pursue the international debt too, but it is very, very significantly less than our own home grown unpaid debt.

If that is your attitude, you might as well ask why every Budget Day, the Chancellor is trying to save £500 million here and £500 million there in order to balance the books.

What attitude? That chasing harder the big debt that’s more likely easier to collect makes more sense than the smaller debt, which will be harder to get! Surely that’s just good sense. In the meantime, perhaps there should be a rethink on whether it makes any kind of sense to be making student loans to overseas students. I don’t know what proportion are not repaying.

So criticizing others for using it is a bit hypocritical.

Good grief.

It's entirely legitimate for UK taxpayers and citizens to question why their government is considering giving away a fee concession to EU students, which will apparently cost the UK's higher education sector £500m. That's in addition to the £6bn of fee loans already owed by EU citizens - including 42,000 EU graduates who have apparently run off without leaving a forwarding address.

Sigh. The UK tax payer won’t be funding it. Any more than they fund fees for students from the US, or Pakistan, or Timbuktu.

Whether you agree with the principle of a fee cap for EU students, funded entirely by the HE sector, in return for a youth mobility scheme available to ALL young people, is a different matter. But don’t argue it’s wrong because the tax payer will be footing the bill because they won’t.

What’s with the sigh? The countries you list pay high o/s fees with no reduction. They subsidise domestic students which is great. If EU run at a deficit per student the money has to come from somewhere else.

Sigh. The UK tax payer won’t be funding it.

They will be eventually, even if indirectly. Also, the Guardian reported several months ago that Brussels has requested that new EU students studying in Scotland pay the local £1,820 "home fee" rate - who will fund that? In addition, we don't yet know for certain whether there has been any discussion over access to student loans.

The Telegraph has also calculated that rejoining the Erasmus programme could cost British taxpayers £8.75bn between 2028 and 2034, far more than announced. During our pre-Brexit membership, the scheme benefitted twice as many EU students coming to the UK as British students going the other way.

in return for a youth mobility scheme available to ALL young people

The benefit of the proposed youth mobility scheme depends on the detail. Will we be flooded with hundreds of thousands of EU citizens up to age 40? Which jobs will they be competing for?

Just sighing at Clavinova. Not a fan of Reform/Restore voters when they spout shit.

I'm not spouting nonsense. I'm not a Reform/Restore voter either.

The AI summary at the top of a google page? The one that is notorious for making things up? It may or may not be true, but please tell me you aren't relying on that as a source.

Ik she doesn’t vote for the parties you’ve listed.

And the deficit per student will be an issue.

Financial Times
5 June 2026

'Meanwhile, British universities are resisting lower fees for EU students and have said the government must compensate them for any concession to Brussels.'

It's consistent with government figures of 75k in year 2024-25.

And how is that the student's fault? My country would simply deduct the money from your salary wherever you are.

My American friends have been living in the UK for decades, and the US government still collects their student loan repayments directly from their wages.

The UK could have done the same, but it didn't. Just like it doesn't require the majority of its students to repay their loans in full.

Maybe you should blame your country's system rather than the students who took the opportunity that was offered to them.
Students can only "run off" if they have been allowed to do so.

This seems unnecessary

Is the outrage in the room with us?

And how is that the student's fault?

What do you mean, how is that the student's fault?! Quite clearly, it's up to the student/graduate to inform the Student Loans Company if they have moved overseas for an extended period and arrange repayments directly. They would be outside the UK tax system for salary deductions unless they were working for a UK based company/UK Gov.

My country would simply deduct the money from your salary wherever you are.

I don't see how. Which country?

My American friends have been living in the UK for decades, and the US government still collects their student loan repayments directly from their wages.

Not unless they work for US based companies. Otherwise your American friends would have to arrange repayments directly from their personal bank accounts.

Would EU students not have to pay fees upfront? Either personally or their country gives them a loan which is used. Genuine question. I didn’t think they’d be entitled to a student loan from our U.K./English student loan company?

Because otherwise yes there’s no way of legally making them pay I don’t think. Dd owes over 100k in student loans and is emigrating to Canada. The student loans company say she must give them an address and when/if she has a job she has to tell them how much she earns and they will work out how much her monthly repayments will be and a direct debit will be set up. It seems to work very much on trust. If she never comes back to the U.K. then I don’t see how they can enforce it, they can’t track her down via tax or NI contributions. She’s getting married and won’t even have the same name! I have no idea if she will pay it back or not.

If she ever comes back to work in the UK she’ll have a nasty surprise so I wouldn’t recommend ignoring it.