Pulse: Trump & Caps – Will Global Policy Shifts Make UK PG Great Again?

• Policy shifts in Australia and Canada have impacted international audiences
• PGT audiences have pivoted away from the US since the election
• The UK is benefitting the most from pivots in international search interest

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I have two objectives with this post. The first is simply to offer a little bit of data-driven hope to UK international teams working in PGT.

The second is to completely avoid making a bad pun linking the inauguration of a US President with a penchant for certain forms of head-gear to potential limits on international student places in Australia and Canada via the flimsy pretext that both happen in January and involve "caps".

Well, you can't win them all.

On a more serious note though, it looks like the UK may be winning *something*.

Our Share of Search metric lets us measure specific shifts in audience behaviour upon Keystone websites. Rather than simply measuring the overall size of an audience which can fluctuate (or not) due to underlying shifts in website traffic, we effectively look inside our search engines to see if the substantial audiences we attract are searching differently.

This is very useful when looking at the impact of something like the US election result. Here's the Share of Search for five core international audiences looking at the 'big four' destinations in Q3 (so, July to September) this year:

What I'm looking at here is the year-on-year shift in PGT (Masters) Share of Search for each audience looking at each destination.

So, South Asian audiences were 30% less likely to search for Canadian study opportunities in Q3 2024 than they were in Q3 2023. I've stacked each of these up for ease of visualisation, so you can see how shifts combine to give a general trend for each destination and still see what the specific figure was for individual audiences.

The obvious thing to remark from a UK perspective is that interest is down (almost) across the board – but the drop is nowhere near as pronounced as it is for Canada and Australia.

This, I think, reflects a pivot in both policy and perception during the second half of 2024.

Most of the major changes for international study in the UK have already happened, with a big impact on postgraduate audiences. But things are now relatively calm: the Graduate Route has been retained and although Labour may not plan to roll back any of the previous government's changes, it is vocally committed to the value of international study in a way the Conservatives hadn't been for quite some time.

Australia and Canada, on the other hand, have been signalling much more dramatic change, including restrictions on post-study work visas and outright caps on international student numbers.

What's more, policy signals outside the UK have been much more erratic. Only last week, Australia's Coalition (an alignment of centre-right parties) announced its intention to oppose the Labor Government (yes, that's the Australian Labor) on its plans to cap study permits because it actually wants restrictions on international students to be more robust. We can probably agree that this is neither clear nor encouraging for international students and, for once, it stands in positive contrast to the relative calm in the UK.

The data above was for Q3, during the run-up to the US election, but comfortably prior to it. And, as you'll have noticed, interest in the USA was actually growing slightly.

Here's what the same chart looks like for Nov 1-24:

With one exception*, every single audience is now showing reduced interest in the USA. And it's the UK that seemingly benefits.

Whereas interest in Canada and Australia hasn't really changed, the UK has gone from a net cumulative drop in interest of 94% across these audiences to a net cumulative rise of 58%.

A plausible conclusion is that the election is having an impact on interest in the USA (something corroborated by our Keystone Pulse survey). It also seems plausible that the UK is now best-placed to benefit from this effect as international audiences remain more sceptical of Australia and Canada.

*That exception is Europe where US interest from several key audiences (including Germany, Ireland and France) is down but we don't yet have sufficient data to dig into the more varied range of audiences overall. I should also note that the smaller time period means we don't have enough East Asian data to analyse credibly yet, so I've left this out for Australia and Canada (honesty about measurements of policy impact is the best policy).

We don't know exactly what Trump will do in relation to international education policy next year and neither do prospective student audiences. But here's the thing: right now, those prospective student audiences probably aren't sure what any of the 'big four' destinations are going to do (and it's not like things aren't changing in Europe as well).

The opportunity for the UK is to take advantage of the relative calm and clarity to articulate the continuity of our postgraduate offer. Put simply, that means reminding and reassuring audiences that things like the Graduate Route aren't changing, there are no plans for outright visa caps and our government overly supports and welcomes international students. As do our universities.

And there's no better time to do that than right now, when more people are searching for UK universities and interest in January is high.

FindAUniversity can support you to do that and our free monthly Pulse data can help you keep an eye on a rapidly shifting international study market.

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