Trump’s promised campus crackdown will prompt US students to look at other options. Let’s welcome them here, writes Will Cooling
It had been barely twenty-four hours since Donald Trump’s return to the White House when Kemi Badenoch used her debut PMQs as leader of the opposition to urge Sir Keir Starmer to work with the new administration on a UK-USA Free Trade Deal. This call has been picked up by other conservatives in both parliament and the media, with Trump’s Scottish heritage, love of golf and interest in our royal family all cited as reasons he might give us a good deal.
Such talk of course runs up against the reality that Trump views trade deals as a zero-sum competition, where any benefits for the other side must come at the expense of America. Britain should be thinking about where it can capitalise on the openness of our economy, rather than indulge Trump’s paranoid fantasies.
One obvious area of focus is higher education. Trump has pledged to suppress dissent on campus. This won’t just be about policing student protests but also attacking lecturers and materials that Trump and his allies dislike. Likewise, his plans to build detention camps across the country so he can deport 10m longstanding immigrant residents, and the way he emboldens racism more generally, will make America a less safe and welcoming place to live and study for young people across the world.
Britain should be best placed to capitalise on people either within America, or across the world, who no longer wish to study in America. British universities routinely compete with their American counterparts in key league tables and, with a centre-left government firmly in place, can promise not just political stability, but that the police and security services won’t tolerate violence or aggression from the far-right.
But for Britain to seize this opportunity, the government must work with a higher education sector that is currently contracting in the face of a severe squeeze on its funding. The government’s commitment to increase tuition fees by £250 is a welcome first step, but it should quickly move to increase them further given the dire state of university finances and the lack of alternative funding sources. The government could mitigate some of the cost to the exchequer by tweaking the repayment terms so that richer graduates pay more than they currently do by establishing an early repayment penalty or mandating a minimum number of monthly contributions.
Likewise, the government should be more welcoming of overseas students. It was always economic malpractice to seek reductions in international students given the key role their fees play in university finances, the money they spend in the local community and the enduring benefit to Britain of the links it makes with upwardly mobile people from across the world. Limiting how many international students can study in Britain makes even less sense when you remember that surveys show that ordinary voters have no objections to such immigrants. Likewise, the government should be aggressive about recruiting academics from America who no longer wish to live and work there.
Bridget Phillipson has spoken about the need for a structural review into higher education. But with money tight she would be better off moving quickly with some simple changes to tuition fees and international student numbers to allow Britain to seize one opportunity that really has been created by the return of Donald Trump.