Key Findings:

• Less than a quarter of recent foreign students are on courses that the Department for Education classifies as “strategically important” for the UK.

• In 2022/2023 there were 459,170 foreign students that began a course at a UK higher education institution. However, just 111,295 (24.9%) of these are on courses that the British government views as important for supporting the NHS, the engineering and technology sectors, or the country’s labour market needs.