Applications for UK student visas fall to their lowest in four years
Home Office figures show student visa applications at their lowest level in four years, published the day after a growth strategy that expects expansion from everything except student recruitment. The two together describe the position universities are in, and explain why the course closures and redundancy programmes announced through this year are unlikely to stop.
Preparing for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement
The Lifelong Learning Entitlement replaces the current student finance system with an account worth four years of funding that can be drawn down across a lifetime, in modules or full courses. This piece is about how universities are getting ready, and the student-facing consequence is real: it changes what you can fund, when, and whether stopping and returning costs you entitlement. Student finance explained covers the system it replaces.
A Reform councillor speaks at a university society, and the argument starts before he does
A Warwick student society’s speaker event with a Reform UK councillor prompted the argument now familiar on every campus: whether hosting is endorsing, and who decides. Under the Office for Students’ free speech conditions, a university or union that blocks a lawful speaker can be complained about directly to the regulator, which has changed the balance of what societies can be told to do.
The student influencer problem
A piece on the students whose feeds show a version of university that nobody is living — the 5am library shifts, the immaculate flat, the effortless first. It is worth reading in the week that first-term results come out, because the comparison is with a performance rather than with anyone’s actual year. Student mental health covers when it stops being a joke.