30 July 2014 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
The permitted student visa refusal rate for which HEIs keep their Highly Trusted Status (HTS) is to reduce from 20% to 10% from the 1st November, the Home Office has announced this week. This means that from that date, any university that has accepted international students to study will be at risk of losing their Tier 4 license if more than 1 in 10 of those prospective students have their visa applications refused.
The Home Office confirm that administrative errors will be excluded from the permitted refusal rate, and that a discretionary approach will be taken with small-scale institutions (i.e. those who offer 50 or less places a year). They also confirm that their policy on enrolment rates and course completion rates will remain unchanged.
They hope that the new measures “will incentivise all institutions to conduct basic checks on their prospective students”, but Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, warned that the policy would force a “truly savage reduction” in international student recruitment, the THE reports.
In the same THE article, Don Ingham, an immigration consultant who advises education providers, is reported as saying: “I would not be surprised to find there were some universities hovering around that [10 per cent] figure…Anything that tightens up an already tight regime would be very harsh and would have a further impact on educational institutions – and within their number there may be some universities who may fall foul of it.”
