The UK should make it easier for British students living abroad to apply to its universities

Students walk through Cambridge University in Cambridge, east of England. AFP

This is a busy period for Year 13 students at the many British curriculum schools in the UAE. Students may typically be preparing for exams while simultaneously seeking to secure a place at a UK university for the following academic year.

The UK’s Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, UCAS, says it handles more than 3 million applicants in each recruitment cycle from 750,000 candidates in Britain and elsewhere. The initial deadline for applications passed at the end of last month and offers are being sent out to prospective students.

The stress of long hours of exam preparation is often added to by the uncertainty over whether an applicant receives offers from their preferred choice of university. There is also a lack of clarity over fee status for British students who may live outside their home country.

For Year 13 students domiciled outside the UK, universities will make a separate call on their residency status, which affects the fees that the undergraduate pays for their studies. They may do this before or after a grades-dependent offer is issued.

The Department of Education in England sets the rules for who secures “home-status”, but individual universities are able to use their discretion in selection processes. Universities may require further evidence of a candidate’s links to the UK before deciding whether a person should be given “home-status” or be classed as an international student. Crucially, being a British passport holder does not automatically confer that status.

It is not unusual for a candidate to have to provide “hard” evidence, such as booking receipts or boarding passes from flights to England over the past few years, or details of their parents’ employment status outside the UK including partial copies of work contracts, or even provide financial documents such as mortgage statements and utility bills to trace footprints back to England and establish familial or habitual connections with their “home” country.

Even when presented with these documents, it is possible that an English university may categorise a student with a UK passport as an international undergraduate rather than offering home-status.

Forms typically ask candidates to explain their 'absence' from Britain, making the presumption that they were 'active and central' participants in a family’s decision to move abroad

Fees for home-status students are capped at £9,250 (about Dh42,000) a year in 2024-25, although they will rise to £9,535 from the next academic year, while overseas student fees are typically at least £20,000 (about Dh90,000) a year. They could even be double that figure for specialist degrees, such as medicine. Those numbers do not consider living costs, which add about £1,200 a month, according to general guidance from the British Council. International students may also be required to pay a substantial deposit to confirm their place once they have received an offer.

UK students can seek publicly funded support, in the form of loans for tuition fees and day-to-day living, which become repayable once a graduate has entered the workforce and is earning above a certain threshold.

Home-status students previously domiciled temporarily outside the UK may be able to apply for maintenance loans, but only after they have lived in the country for three years, which is the length of a standard undergraduate degree. They are likely to be able to apply for loans to support their tuition fees. International students will probably have to entirely fund their studies from savings, cashflow, gifts or scholarships.

So how do you unpick this Gordian Knot? The easiest way to unclog administrative backlogs would be to either classify all British passport holder applicants as home-status students or, failing that, to create three tiers of fees.

That would mean adding a “returning to the UK after attending school abroad” category to sit in between home and international status. At least that would provide clarity for families overseas and allow them to better plan financially over the longer term, assuming fee levels were set at a reasonable compromise level.

Universities should also be encouraged to have a standard set of information requirements or forms when making fee status judgment. While they operate under common guidelines, their discretionary powers promote quirks in the system and prompt varying levels of disclosure, so that two students may have very different outcomes from the same university, even when their circumstances are broadly similar.

While estimates vary about how many UK passport holders live overseas, it is probably no less than 5.5 million people, many of whom are young people who will seek to return to UK universities at 18 or 19 years old.

Those young adults are unlikely to have been primary decision-makers in their households when a family left the UK to move abroad. But forms typically ask candidates to explain and account for their “absence” from Britain, making the presumption that they were “active and central” participants in a family’s decision to move abroad.

These forms also assume that families exist in unchanging suspension once they leave the UK. Many expatriates with school-aged children leave the UK for work but could suddenly return if job opportunities dry up elsewhere or family circumstances demand a permanent return to Britain. Home-status forms typically assume expats have emigrated to their host country, rather than, in many cases, temporarily residing overseas.

A fresh perspective is required and one that starts with redefining the meaning of “home” country.