As Big Ben ticked closer to midnight on 31 January 2020, Nigel Farage, one of the champions of the Brexit movement, was welcomed on to the stage at Parliament Square – with deep irony – by a cover of The Final Countdown by the Swedish rock band Europe.
But as Farage declared the UK’s official exit from the European Union “the greatest moment in the modern history of our great nation”, academics across the country girded their loins for what was widely expected to be a wholly negative impact on UK universities.
In the event, the effects of Brexit paled into insignificance compared with the Covid-19 pandemic that was about to break out and the rampant inflation that has wreaked havoc with university finances. Nevertheless, five years on from the Final Countdown, many experts believe that Brexit’s effects are becoming apparent.
Anand Menon is professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London and director of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank, which has charted the effects of Brexit and which the Economic and Social Research Council recently announced it would cease to fund from April, prompting a backlash. Menon’s view is that while the status of UK universities themselves has not been damaged by Brexit, the reputation of the country at large has been – which has its effect on universities.
The UK is viewed as a “less welcoming place” by some Europeans now, while many institutions have struggled to recruit EU students since they were required to start paying international tuition fees in August 2021, Menon said.
That is borne out by data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa), which reveals that EU postgraduates made up only 6 per cent of the UK’s total cohort in 2022-23 – down from 15 per cent in 2020-21 and 20 per cent in 2018-19.
A total of 28,905 EU students entered UK universities at all levels in 2022-23 – the lowest number since 2008-09. By comparison, about 10 times more students in 2022 came from China, India and Nigeria combined in 2022-23.
Lewis said the accompanying decrease in the number of visiting European students in UK universities as a result of the UK’s decision to leave the Erasmus+ exchange programme also reflects a “more general narrowing of horizons” for UK students.
The UK’s Erasmus replacement, the globally-oriented Turing Scheme, has funded study placements for UK students, both in Europe and globally, since September 2021, but has been labelled “suboptimal” by critics – not least because it does not fund overseas students to come to the UK.
Recent reports have suggested that a youth mobility scheme between the UK and the EU could be back on the cards. However, the European Commission’s proposals for EU students to pay domestic tuition fees would further impact university finances.
Experts have suggested that the decline in EU students has also harmed degree outcomes, since they tend to get the best grades.
Martine Garland, formerly a lecturer in marketing at Aberystwyth Business School, agreed that students from Europe were much more committed to their studies and typically submit a high standard of work. By “effectively shrinking the market overnight”, Brexit forced post-1992 institutions in particular to admit weaker students in order to maintain numbers and remain financially viable, she said, piling pressure on teaching staff.
“Coupled with visa restrictions and the fee income effectively been having frozen for years during soaring inflation – we have a perfect storm for a financial crisis in the sector,” she said.
For his part, Menon calls the previous government’s decision to ban international master’s students from bringing dependants to the UK – resulting in steep falls in international enrolments – “batshit crazy”.
“You build a model in which higher education is dependent on foreign students and then start saying, ‘We have to reduce the immigration numbers, including foreign students.’ You’ve got a university funding crisis in the making,” he said.
“My hunch is that the top universities will get away with keeping their numbers up because of their reputations, but I think as you go lower down, institutions are going to struggle to find enough foreign students to subsidise domestic students,” Menon said.
Many of the UK’s international students come from China and India, despite repeated warnings that recruitment needs to be more diverse to avoid the potential impact of sudden geopolitical shifts.
Ben Sheldon, an ecologist at the University of Oxford, has felt the Brexit effect on student recruitment. “One of the impacts that has been most obvious is the extreme challenge of recruiting graduate students from Europe, as they now face a tripling of university fees compared with pre-Brexit levels,” he says. “Many of those students [become] future postdocs and, eventually, academic staff, so I suspect we are cutting off an important route to a high-quality scientific workforce at its source.”
Peter Coveney, professor of physical chemistry at UCL, said diversification was also an issue for staff recruitment – with the prospect of “Cold War 2.0” threatening to hurt applications from Chinese researchers.
“It’s a desperate state and we are in a real pickle in terms of financing…The underlying reason is that there has been a haemorrhaging of interest from Europe in coming over to the UK,” he said.
Statistics show that the composition of UK staff has changed since the Brexit vote. The latest Hesa data reveals that 15 per cent of academics at UK institutions were from the EU in 2023-24 – down from a peak of 18 per cent in 2018-19. They have been replaced by colleagues from elsewhere in the world, with the total number of non-EU staff almost doubling over the past decade. And a recent paper found that since the Brexit vote, the UK has on average attracted scholars of lower quality and has found it harder to retain the best ones.
Coveney agreed that Brexit had made the UK a less attractive place to work and also a harder place to get into for Europeans – which was reducing the quality of UK research to a “much lower level”.
“Many European universities are…just not quite sure about the exact standing of the UK and whether it’s all going to unravel again,” he added.
He also laments the UK’s loss of influence over the shape of the European Union’s research framework, Horizon Europe: “We used to be at the table, saying what the work programme was going to be about. Now we just have to take what’s put in front of us,” he said.
Associating to Horizon Europe was written into the UK’s withdrawal agreement with the EU, but was held up for several years by a bitter wrangle with the European Commission over trading arrangements in Northern Ireland, with the UK finally being admitted in 2023 after the agreement of the Windsor Framework.
However, UK institutions remain at “arm’s length” from other large-scale initiatives worth billions of euros, according to Coveney. These include, in his field, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking.
“When it comes to things like supercomputing at the moment…there is a really pitiful state of play in the UK, and we don’t really look like serious players,” he said. With fewer high-quality European applicants making the UK more reliant on Chinese postdocs, he warned that the UK was in a “downward spiral” in his field.
During the wrangling over the Northern Ireland protocol, UK-based researchers remained eligible to apply for Horizon Europe grants, in hope that association would be completed by the time the awards were announced. On the repeated occasions when it was not, the UK government funded the grants awarded to UK-based researchers.
Nevertheless, at least when it comes to the prestigious grants handed out by the European Research Council for “frontier research”, the UK’s relative success has declined in recent years.
In 2015, the year before the Brexit referendum, UK-based researchers won the most grants in each of the three main categories of ERC grants, winning 17 per cent of starting grants (for early-career researchers), 22 per cent of consolidator grants (for mid-career researchers) and a full 25 per cent of advanced grants (for senior researchers). By 2023, those figures had fallen to 8 per cent for starting grants (the 5th highest), 14 per cent for consolidator grants (2nd) and 16 per cent for advanced grants (2nd). And while that went up to 10 per cent (3rd) for starting grants in 2024, following the UK’s Horizon association, it fell for consolidator grants to 12 per cent (3rd); figures for advanced grants are yet to be announced.
Interestingly, the market shares of early- and mid-career researchers with British nationality (though not for senior researchers) have largely held steady. Assuming that most British researchers are UK-based, this suggests that the departure of high-quality European researchers from the UK post-Brexit may be part of the explanation for the UK’s decline in performance.
Top UK universities also receive far less research funding from Europe than they used to.
The 18 Russell Group institutions to have published data on this for 2023-24 received a total of £278 million in research grants and contracts from the European Commission. This was down from £339 million in 2022-23 and £405 million in 2019-20.
In terms of research collaborations, however, top-level figures suggest that little has changed for the UK.
Analysis by Digital Science, using data from its Dimensions research database, found that the proportion of UK papers with at least one collaborator from the EU-27 – still the UK’s top research partner – has risen annually since 2016, reaching 30 per cent by 2024.
And though it remains well behind the US, the UK continues to be the EU-27’s second most prolific collaborator – appearing on 8 per cent of papers last year.
Because the UK is so heavily embedded in the global research ecosystem, its intensity of collaboration with the EU is relatively unchanged since Brexit, according to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) at Clarivate. However, Jonathan Adams, chief scientist at the ISI and visiting professor at King’s College London’s Policy Institute, said the bar on UK researchers leading European consortia during its years outside Horizon Europe “may affect the extent to which the UK is able to acquire its previous share of the IP and the kudos that comes out of this work”.
Any hindrance to international collaboration would have an effect on research success, Adams believes. “The key to all this is that [the existence of] a global network of leading research institutions means that it is intellectually infeasible for any nation to expect to ‘go it alone’,” he said. “If you’re not an active member of the network then you’re not in the conversation.”
