Why Today’s Universities Need to Be Global Institutions

Across the globe, universities that are grappling with the COVID-19 health crisis are also facing a potential financial crisis due to the loss of international students that many of these institutions have come to rely upon as a vital source of funding. In the U.K., a fifth of all higher education students — roughly 500,000 in 2017-2018 — are international. This has great economic benefit to universities and economies. In the U.K., the higher fees that international students pay for tuition, living expenses, and other spending, have a net economic impact of around £20 billion a year, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute. And international students contributed $45 billion to the U.S. economy in 2018, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. As universities and schools have closed temporarily to curb the spread of COVID-19, heads of institutions and other educational leaders have had to quickly innovate and switch to online learning, while many students are unsure if they will graduate. These impacts, along with Brexit, could may well mean that there will be a decline in the next four to five years in the number of international students.