Chief Executive, Universities UK
STUDYING IN THE UK - Vivienne Stern, Director of UK Universities International - The Agenda
WHAT'S THE ISSUE? At the beginning of the winter term in 2020, Stephen Cole spoke to Vivienne Stern, Director of UK ...
About Vivienne Stern
Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, has been a prominent voice in debates about the financial sustainability of UK higher education. In a March 2025 podcast, she described a "fundamental structural problem in the funding of teaching and research" affecting all four nations of the UK, warning that failure to address it would erode "this extremely important national capability." She characterized the current situation as a "fork in the road" where the existing path leads to the "slow diminution of something that we used to be really, really proud of." Stern stated that the balance between public and private contribution to higher education is "wrong" in both Scotland and England, and said she would reintroduce maintenance grants for students, invest more public funding, and index fees from 2026. Stern has also defended the value of university education against political criticism. In May 2024, she pushed back against then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's proposal to close courses with poor outcomes, arguing that the data cited was "misleading" and that graduates earn consistently more than non-graduates over 15 years. She noted that the regulator's own data shows 93% completion rates and 99% of students on courses with good progression to jobs. Stern has advocated for separating temporary student migration from permanent migration in policy debates, and has highlighted the importance of international students to UK universities, describing them as making an "incredibly important contribution" to creating international learning environments.
Transcript (17 segments)
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Vivienne Stern0:00
I think we've all been quite surprised. When we spoke last, we weren't sure that international students would still feel that they could travel internationally for study. We thought that all of that activity might just cease. And in fact what we've found is that students are pretty resilient, they're pretty determined, and that the numbers of students registered with UK universities in many cases grew rather than shrinking. So I think it indicates that people, and perhaps particularly young people, aren't willing to put their plans on hold because of the pandemic.
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Interviewer0:32
Well you're right. There was good news for British universities. 272,500 international students started at UK universities and that's up by seven percent on last year. So why do they want to come to Britain to study?
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Vivienne Stern0:48
Well, I think there are a couple of things that have happened. First of all, the UK has always been a really popular destination for students who are looking to study abroad. But for the last decade or so, I would say the UK had a pretty difficult policy environment. We weren't very generous when it came to visas, for example, and in particular we made it very hard for international students who came to study with us to stay and work after they graduated. That has changed, and I think we saw an immediate impact on the level of interest in studying in the UK when those visa changes were introduced.
I think the other thing is that inevitably during the last year or so we've seen a number of very popular destinations for international students haven't reopened their borders. Throughout the last year and a half, Australia and New Zealand have been shut. So any student who wants to study with an Australian or New Zealand university has to study fully online. Many of them have been willing to do that, but we know that for international students the kind of total immersion that you get from being in a different country, being able to experience life in another country and all of the things that go with that, is really important. So I think the UK benefited slightly from that.
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Interviewer2:08
And that's quite explicable, isn't it? Because that's what you want as a young student, to immerse yourself in a foreign, different culture. But what we are also seeing is more students coming to Britain from China than from EU member states. And why is that?
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Vivienne Stern2:24
Well, I mean the UK has been experiencing really strong growth in demand from Chinese students for a number of years, and I think it's been a real success story. And we have at the same time seen a decline in interest from European destinations, and that's partly I think a consequence of Brexit. So looked at from one perspective, whilst European students are thinking twice about whether they can still come to the UK following our departure from the EU, Chinese students in many cases saw that meant that lots of universities would have spaces available effectively for Chinese applicants. And it may be that that's also influenced the propensity of students, particularly seeking really selective, highly selective programs in very prestigious institutions, to increase their interest. I don't know how long-lasting the European effect will be. I suspect that demand will recover a little bit, but at the moment that shift is with us for a few years.
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Interviewer3:26
And overseas students are important economically, but I wonder, because universities some say are turning into businesses more than academic institutions, is there a risk if this continues they will take those overseas students coming for granted?
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Vivienne Stern3:43
Well, the first thing is they're not really businesses. Most, if not all, universities in the UK are charities, which means that they don't distribute—
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Interviewer3:52
But that's for tax reasons, isn't it?
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Vivienne Stern3:55
No, it's because the fundamental difference is that anything that a university receives in terms of income from research or for student tuition gets invested back into research and tuition. So these things contribute to being able to provide a great place for students to learn. Now, of course universities want to expand the resources they've got available to invest in teaching and learning, but it's not going off into shareholders, it's going back into the academic life of the institution. And so it is important. Those students who come, they contribute, and they contribute not only to the intellectual life of the university, but they also contribute to the university's ability to provide one of the world's best places to study at tertiary level.
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Interviewer4:46
A lot of the universities, Vivienne, as you know, are still teaching the majority of their courses online. That's not value for money, is it? Overseas students coming a long way, but is there a substantial number still teaching online? They're not giving the face-to-face experience that the overseas students are paying a lot of money for.
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Vivienne Stern5:07
No, that's not true. There's been a lot of confusion about this because many universities are keeping lectures online, so those large format teaching activities where you might have 100 or more people in one room together, those activities in many cases are still happening online. But it's really important to understand that's not the primary mode of teaching in British universities. All universities in our membership are doing face-to-face teaching this term. It's absolutely essential in all of those courses where you need practical, hands-on access to laboratories or maker spaces or studios, or the kind of practice-based learning that you have to undertake in lots of professional disciplines. And it's also really important in our system that we get small groups together to take part in seminars, in group-based learning. All of that stuff is happening face-to-face.
The message though to any student or parent who's worried about this is: call the university that you're interested in studying at and ask them, what are they doing? How are they mixing face-to-face tuition and online? And where they're teaching online, why are they doing that? Is that going to be a short-term measure because they want to limit the spread of COVID, which is necessary at the moment, or is it going to remain online because they think for some reason that's a more effective way of teaching? And there are cases where that does seem to be true, that when a bit of a course is delivered in a certain way online, students benefit from that. So I don't think it will disappear with COVID, but it's always going to be alongside face-to-face. And our universities are teaching face-to-face.
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Interviewer7:00
Are overseas students becoming more important than domestic students?
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Vivienne Stern7:07
Oh, there's a balance. The majority of students in universities are from the UK, they're UK domiciled, and universities have a very important social role in our education system. It's not that we don't think that universities should serve their communities and the national education system, so it's always going to be a balance. But we would argue that when UK students go to universities that have international populations, everybody benefits. And I think it's important, particularly at university level, that students have exposure to people from different cultures and different countries and different backgrounds. I think that makes our education system better, because we want to challenge the way that people think, we want to give them an idea of different parts of the world that they may only have a very dim idea about when they start university. So it's a very important thing to have a diverse student population in British universities.
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Interviewer8:15
Vivienne Stern, many thanks to you for joining us here on the agenda.
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Vivienne Stern8:18
My pleasure, thank you.