This is Matt Durnin, Global Head of Insights and Consultancy at the British Council,
back with a third update on our rolling surveys, covering the impacts of
Covid-19 on international student mobility to UK universities. We began this
series in late March, with our first survey of China, after which we covered
India and Pakistan. This week, we'll digest findings from across eight key East Asia
countries and territories, including a second-round survey of mainland China.
The survey is also currently running on three other continents, and we'll soon
have results from those in the coming weeks. Let's start by looking at our
survey sample. In total we received 15,536 valid responses across the
eight markets. We distributed the survey in several additional countries as well,
but didn't receive enough responses to include those in this update. In any case,
these eight markets are very useful markets to focus on. Together, they
comprised just over half of the UK's non-EU international HE enrolments in
2018 / 2019. China accounted for the lion's share of that total, with 40% of new
enrolments. Now on to our survey findings. The core question of our survey
is how likely respondents are to cancel or delay their overseas study plans this
year. Looking at the results across the eight markets, we can see substantial
differences in how they responded...here, highlighting the negative responses to
make the comparison clearer. But before we go deeper with the analysis, we need
to review how these markets differ. In particular, we see very different
patterns in UK enrolments by level of study across the eight markets. While
postgraduate students tend to comprise the majority of new UK enrolments from
East Asia every year, three markets stand out as exceptions: Hong Kong, Malaysia and
Singapore skew heavily towards the undergraduate level. The differing
patterns in level of study across the markets underline the importance of
digging further into the data. Indeed, when we do so, we see substantial
differences in how prospective undergraduates and postgraduates
responded to the survey. Across the board, we saw notably stronger intentions to
delay or cancel study plans amongst prospective postgraduate students.
Indonesia, Malaysia and Taiwan stand out as markets with particularly strong
intentions to abandon postgraduate study plans this
year. Singapore potentially as well, but our sample was a bit too small for us to
be confident in the results there. It's not terribly surprising that
postgraduate students would be more likely to cancel.
Most of our post-grad enrolments from the region are on one-year postgraduate
taught courses, so a disruption to the autumn term would have a significant
impact on the total study experience. For UK universities, the silver lining of
this cloud is the relatively more positive response from undergraduate
students. A drop in postgraduate enrolments would mostly have a
one-year impact to universities, while any undergraduate declines would feed
through the three to four years of their intended course. We also now have two
rounds of survey data for mainland China - the first from late March / early May, and
a second from around a month later. What's notable is that there's almost no
change. At the postgraduate level, responses shifted very slightly
towards delaying or cancelling, while at the undergraduate level, at first glance
there seems to be a shift towards more positive sentiments, but this isn't quite
what it appears to be. In the second round of the survey, we partnered with
UCAS to gain a larger undergraduate sample, and what we found on close
inspection was that respondents who came from the UCAS channels (here in
orange) were notably more positive about keeping their overseas study plans. Why?
Well we're not sure, but one possibility is that students leaning towards
delaying or cancelling might be quicker to disengage with UCAS
communications than those coming from the British Council. Or maybe our
undergraduate sample is flawed. In any case, when we removed the UCAS data,
our undergraduate sentiments on delaying or cancelling looked almost identical to
the last round. So we still have around 40 percent of Chinese respondents
sitting on the fence about whether they will keep or cancel their plans and
nothing that happened during the month of April seemed to budge them either way.
With a more nuanced understanding of how sentiments are shaping up at the
undergraduate and postgraduate levels, we can estimate the impact of likely
cancellations from the eight markets. Here, we'll look at two scenarios. Our
baseline scenario assumes that only those respondents who said that they are
'very likely' to delay or cancel, or have already done so, will be lost
from the coming intake. Meanwhile, our pessimistic scenario assumes that UK
universities will also lose respondents who are 'somewhat likely' to cancel as
well as all of those who are currently sitting on the fence. To gauge the
financial impact of these scenarios, we compiled estimates on students' spending
on tuition fees and living expenses using HESA data on non-EU fees, and
Department for Education reports on student expenditure from 2015, and then
we updated these using the Bank of England's Inflation Calculator. Based on
those calculations, we estimate that on average undergraduates spend £31,685
pounds on tuition and living expenses
per academic year, while postgraduates spend £35,001. With that
information in hand, and what we know from UK international enrolment data
about differences in study level by market, we can estimate that our baseline
scenario would lead to 13,539 fewer new
UK university enrolments from these eight markets - which is a 12% decrease
compared to the 2018/2019 academic year - and a decrease of £463
million pounds in direct student expenditure. To put that number in
context, £463 million pounds is roughly equivalent to
the annual income of a mid-sized UK university. Meanwhile, our pessimistic
scenario would mean that new enrolments from our eight East Asia markets would
plummet by over 68,000 - a decline of 61% compared to the
most recent year of enrolment data. The financial impacts would be severe, with a
£2.3 billion pound decline in student spending on tuition fees and living
expenses. For context, that's just slightly more than the total income that
the University of Cambridge reported last year. And if you need something to
sharpen your focus on the importance of what happens in student recruitment over
the next one to two months, the difference between our baseline and
pessimistic scenarios is over 54,000 students and £1.9 billion pounds in direct
student expenditure. Again, we're only talking about the impact from the eight
markets covered in this survey. As a final point about our estimated impacts,
I would add that, if anything, we are underestimating the full impact for at
least three reasons. First, we haven't included the impact of current students who may
discontinue their studies, nor have we included the multi-year impact of
undergraduate deferrals and cancellations, and we're probably not
capturing some of the students who have already decided to cancel. And that's
because we suspect that students are less likely to engage with our channels
once they've made a decision not to go ahead with their study plans. So what are
the key issues that are creating uncertainty for prospective students?
We asked survey respondents to tell us how concerned they are about five issues.
As in the past two surveys, three issues stood out: health and well-being; personal
safety; and finances. This chart shows the percentage of respondents who were
'somewhat' or 'very concerned' about each issue. Mainland China, Indonesia, Vietnam,
and - to a slightly lesser extent - Taiwan, had particularly strong levels of
concern around health and well-being and personal safety. Indonesia and Vietnam
also showed high levels of concern regarding finances. Thailand, meanwhile,
showed comparatively low levels of concern. This could be because we
captured a larger sample of international school students there, or
it could come down to cultural differences. In general, we've seen
respondents from Thailand be somewhat hesitant to give negative feedback in
previous surveys. The other two issues, application difficulties and distance
from home, attracted much lower levels of concern, but it's worth noting that
Indonesia and Vietnam registered relatively high levels of concern about
application difficulties, so there perhaps is a need to more clearly articulate
contingency plans in the admission process in these two countries. We could also now
compare concerns in round 1 and round 2 of the China survey. The good news is
that none of the top three concerns worsened. And the bad news is that none
of the top three concerns eased either. In fact, we saw almost no change in
responses across the two surveys. In this round of the survey, we also asked a
question asking respondents, if they are not able to start on campus this autumn,
which of the four following alternatives would they prefer? To start online in
autumn, with face-to-face start in January. Delay their start until January.
Defer until autumn 2021. Or cancel altogether.
First, we'll focus on preferences for an online start in autumn or delayed start
in January. This chart is a bit crowded, but we'll clear the picture up in a
second. Again, we see very important differences between prospective
undergraduate and postgraduate students. At the undergraduate level, respondents
were close to split regarding online versus delayed start. Prospective
undergraduate students from Vietnam did show a much stronger preference for a
delayed start but the sample size here was a bit small. At the postgraduate
level, the preference for a delayed January start is clear in all markets except for
Hong Kong and Singapore - and both of these had relatively small
samples at the postgraduate level. Postgraduate preferences in China,
Malaysia and Vietnam showed especially strong preferences for the delayed
January start. Our survey findings do confirm the importance that many
students place on an in-person start to their course, as well as the ability to
do so this autumn. If we turn our attention to the other two options we
gave students, deferring or cancelling their overseas study plans, we can see
that together, these options made up a substantial portion of the responses.
Undergraduate respondents are shown in red, post graduate in blue, the lighter
shades show a preference for deferring, while the darker shades show preference
for cancelling all together. Again, we've indicated the smallish sample
sizes with outlines. The results here are striking.
Aside from China, around a quarter to a half of respondents said they would
delay or cancel if they cannot start their course on campus in person in
autumn. Universities are not all on the same page regarding their start plans at
this point, but if your university does plan to welcome international students
to campus this autumn, these findings underline the importance of
communicating that message quickly. Finally, one question we've frequently
received since the survey started is whether students are likely to change
their study plans to one of the other major study destinations. To answer that,
we'll look at UK offer-holders who told us that they were at least 'somewhat
likely' to delay or cancel their study plans. We asked these respondents which
country they would change to if they chose to alter their original plans.
Overall, close to half told us they would change their
plans to their own country. The next most popular answer was the UK, and this seems
to be mostly students indicating that they would defer their offers until next
year. Australia did however show up as a notably more popular choice than the
other major study destinations. If we drill down to individual markets, we see
that responses did vary across the eight markets. Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam
showed much more varied responses regarding alternate locations, but the
sample sizes were small in the latter two. But these findings do suggest that
Australia, and, to a lesser degree, the US, could challenge UK market share in some
of the Southeast Asia markets. In general, the patterns we see here don't
look very different from what we see in a normal year - students are not quick to
change or consider alternative destinations. But it's possible that over
the next one to two months, we'll see the emergence of late-stage,
aggressive marketing attempts to sway students away from their original choice
of study destination. There's little precedent to say how successful those
efforts might be in the current situation. In any case, we are now
entering a more competitive environment for international education that is
likely to continue well beyond this year, lasting at least until we see a full
recovery in outbound mobility. That's all for this update. Thanks for watching
and keep an eye out for our next round of survey results over the next few
weeks.