My theme for this blog is partly an obvious seasonal affectation and partly a memory – as all ghosts are – of some of my own Christmases past. For during my own PhD, I found myself teaching an undergraduate seminar on Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
I would begin with a series of promotional posters for the story's many, many screen adaptations (including The Muppets, of course) and ask what they all had in common, visually. The answer was that, with or without Jim Carrey, George C. Scott or Kermit the Frog in the foreground, the city formed the background. We would then talk about Dickens' depiction of an urban world in which multitudes of mutual obligation were obscured by a visible disconnection; where the present means to feast in some places would still lead to a future haunted by the consequences of famine elsewhere.
Is any of that a metaphor for a PG sector that contains its own multitudes and where the impact of policy falls, for now, unevenly? Perhaps the ghost of one.
Regardless, this shall be an overview of where I think we find ourselves for UK international postgraduate recruitment as we look to 2026. And it too shall be visited by three ghosts.
Sector-wide data for postgraduate recruitment in 2025/26 won't be with us until HESA 2027, by which time things really will feel somewhat spectral.
But we do have early indicators from the Home Office, where the number of visas granted to main applicants (so approved visas for students themselves, not their dependents) is up 7% in the year ending September 2025.
This is relative to a year of decline in 2024/25, but it still leaves overall (mostly Masters-level) international recruitment well above any year prior to 2022/23.
Christmas morning finally dawns and the view from Scrooge's window is rather festive. This looks, from above, like a 'good year' for UK postgraduate recruitment.
But whether 2025/26 actually feels like a good year probably depends on when you look – and which part of the sector you're in when you do.
This time I've charted Home Office data for visa applications (not grants) by month across 2024 and 2025.
This gives us a better understanding of what's happening inside an application cycle.
The 2024 trend is a broadly consistent picture. Almost every month is down, with big falls for Spring entry making sense in a world that's just seen a PGT dependent ban in January.
The 2025 trend is more peculiar, with almost all of the growth in Spring. This is partly because we're now comparing to a very poor Spring 2024 and partly due to a growth in April and May entry points.
Either way, a big chunk of that overall 7% rise takes place in the first five months of the year; if we were to compare total applications for June-November alone, 2025 would only be 2% up on 2024, mostly thanks to September.
The result is that an overall figure of +7% for the sector won't feel like it across the sector. Universities that didn't recruit heavily in Spring will be competing for a much smaller slice of growth in Autumn. Not everybody is sending out for that prize turkey.
Recent survey data from BUILA probably confirms this, with a majority of universities self-reporting lower postgraduate enrolments for 2025/26. One thing I note in this data is that declines from some traditional audiences (India, Nigeria and China) are set against growth from Europe and the US. If this sample holds true then how well a university has done out of that 7% (or 2%...) growth may depend on how well they've been able to orientate themselves towards the segments that are growing vs those that are falling.
Well, if not dead, then still somewhat horizontal.
We can use the monthly change in visa applications as a proxy for Masters interest (as above), because most of these applications are for level 7 programmes. But so few, relatively speaking, are for level 8 that it's harder to draw useful conclusions for PhD.
We're left instead with that 'top level' quarterly data for visas granted as of September. This, too, is basically flat.
There were 5,784 entry clearance visas granted to doctoral applicants in Q3 2025, down from 5,794 in Q3 2024. A decrease of 10 people, amounting to about -0.2%. For the full year it's 158 people, or just under -2%.
PhD recruitment may be haunted in the future. But that's for two ghosts time.
Thankfully, our ghost of the present is almost as abundant as Dickens' own (bonus points if you're picturing the excellent Jim Henson version). Because here I can access all of Keystone's search and survey data to understand how interest in the UK is developing.
But, this is also the point in the tale when we, like Scrooge, begin to notice a wider world and heed the extent to which our own experiences' are shaped by mutual connection rather than isolation.
Because the UK's international recruitment experience is happening in less of a vacuum than a storm – one we've repeatedly attempted to chart on the main Keystone blog and particularly in my (less Dickensian) musings there on global trends to watch for 2026.
I won't re-animate these conversations here but I will summon up some of our data for search trends:
The lines here are long-term Share of Search interest for each of the 'Big 4' countries, at Masters and PhD level, indexed back to Autumn 2023 (showing us whether interest is up or down relative to then). There's a fair bit going on here and I recommend you use the filters to pick between levels and / or destinations.
For the USA we see two versions of the same general trend. At Masters-level, interest fluctuates before dropping in the wake of policy statements, intentions and announcements (the lines between aren't always clear to students) which hit visa applications and processing in late Spring. At PhD-level there's an earlier and steadier decline, likely spurred by additional concern here over threatened funding cuts for programmes and institutions. All topics that have been part of the conversation around US student recruitment this year.
For Australia and Canada we see a more negative and more consistent fall at Masters level for destinations that have probably made the most dramatic changes to their international education offer (raising visa fees, altering post-study work and seeking to cap foreign numbers). The trends for PhD are less obvious, with more recovery for Canada. Some of this may be due to the exemption of doctoral students from study permit caps; some may simply be audiences pivoting from competitors.
For the UK we see a similar trend at both levels, with a fall during 2023 and early 2024 as the PGT dependent ban hits alongside higher UKVI and IHS fees (which we mustn't forget also affect doctoral students). But then there's a recovery lasting into 2025, which probably reflects the relative stability of UK policy and its ability to benefit from audiences pivoting away from key competitors.
But we can now see that trend flattening at both levels. Which brings us to our next set of ghosts.
As an aside, I think Dickens would have had a lot of fun with the concept of a 'white paper': a concrete instrument of written government intention, combining clarity with vaguery in a visual and metaphorical register of emptiness and blankness bordering on spectrality. Also maybe snow, I guess.
But if white papers can haunt higher education recruitment (work with me here) then we've had at least three ghosts visit us already this year.
A cut from 24 to 18 months for Bachelors and Masters students (not for PhD) was announced with the immigration white paper in May and confirmed in early October to impact graduates from January 2027 onwards (so, anyone starting a Masters from January 2026).
We ran a question in Pulse to try and predict what this might mean (albeit at a very high level). Here's what the data looks like over time:
Here I'm including data for all non-UK Masters respondents looking to study a Masters abroad (filtering to UK-bound audiences introduces a potential bias as anyone answering this question in more recent months has probably 'priced in' the cut).
The glass half-full read is that the proportion of people saying a shorter Graduate Route is a 'deal breaker' for UK study intentions is never more than 20%. And the proportion saying this makes no difference is usually the slight majority.
The glass half-empty read is that the picture worsens when the timeline is confirmed in October and we also begin to see a levelling off of search interest in the UK here (see above).
The government themselves predict a 'modest' drop of 12,000 fewer applicants per year, following an initially outsized fall. All eyes on January 2026 to see what that looks like.
If you're reading this, you probably know more about the impact of stricter visa compliance thresholds (rising from 90 to 95% and being phased in from this autumn) than me. If only because you probably have some idea what your institution is doing.
The best sector-wide knowledge we have is still anecdotal, as the FT recently reports that a number of universities are pulling away from recruitment in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan where visa refusal rates are higher.
That said, we can see a BCA-shaped pattern in the data for visa applications I shared earlier. It's suspicious that recruitment slows down following May and plausible that at least some of this is the effect of 'supply-side' changes like those reported above. If universities aren't as proactively recruiting international students in some places, then visa applications from those places will be down; and if those are the places where a lot of applications have typically come from then...
Another supply-side stick and one that very much speaks to my pseudo-theme of Dickensian feast vs famine. We now know that this will be a flat fee of £925 per student (and per year), that universities won't pay it on their first 220 students and that it's being introduced for the 2028/29 academic year.
The team at Wonkhe have explained this more distinctly and succinctly than I can in this extended dance between Victorian moral fiction and postgraduate recruitment. But, basically, a flat fee impacts universities who charge lower fees more than universities who can charge more. Because it's a smaller proportion of the higher fee and because the student willing to pay that higher fee is more likely willing to pay a bit more to offset it. Actually, that was pretty succinct.
Of our three policies, this one impacts students the least obviously. Everyone is getting a shorter Graduate Route. And students from some parts of the world are presumably finding universities less keen to seek or progress their applications. But whether a given international student actually ends up paying £925 more per year than they otherwise would in the 2028/29 academic year probably depends on a lot of other decisions that individual universities haven't made yet. And in a system of unregulated fees, all international students will be paying more for a UK degree in four cycles' time anyway.
Regardless, this topic is already being picked up on and debated by prospective students. And where there is confusion, there is room for (eventual) clarity and explanation.
As eager Dickensians and expert pub-quizzers will know, there are actually four ghosts in A Christmas Carol (Marley was dead, to begin with). So I can have one more too.
The post-16 white paper included more references to postgraduate than any other in almost a decade. Most of them were to PhD and most of those were to the idea of a 'home grown' pipeline for UK research talent.
We'll have to see whether improving home grown PGR recruitment means more funding for domestic students (which would be welcome) and whether that ends up reducing international appeal (which would be less so from the point of view of an overall talent and R&D pipeline).
Here we are then, back in the present; having reckoned with the past and pondered the future. What can we ultimately say about it?
It's clear to me that the UK is still in an enviable position when it comes to appealing to international audiences. Keystone's data clearly shows that demand remains strong relative to previous years and in comparison to major competitors.
A shorter Graduate Route is likely to have some impact, but Pulse data so far gives us reasons to be optimistic. And, after all, the 18 months a UK Masters graduate will now be entitled to is still 50% longer than that offered via OPT in the USA. The sector – and individual universities' – ability to articulate the value of this post-study route and help students progress to employment within it could be more important than its length.
BCA metrics will make some markets riskier and some universities more hesitant, but we live in a world where audiences for the UK are increasingly diverse: to put this into context, audiences who fail to meet the tighter thresholds make up less than 10% of the international total on FindAMasters and FindAPhD.
The fee levy is unwelcome and – speaking purely personally – feels misconceived. But our hands here aren't tied: we have time to plan and time to lobby.
Are these the best of times (to mix Dickensian references)? No. But, for those of us who can remember back to the Christmases of 2023 (dependent ban) or even 2020 (Brexit) nor are they the worst.
If you're reading this, you care about international postgraduate recruitment. So do we and so will we in 2026.