From Public Good to Sales Funnel: How UK Higher Education Became a Market?
By Zonash Amanullah (United Kingdom)
For generations, higher education in Britain was defended as a public good: a national investment in knowledge, citizenship, research, professional formation and social mobility. In England especially, that idea has been steadily hollowed out. Recent scholarship argues that the decisive shift came through successive rounds of marketisation culminating in the full-fee domestic model of 2012, after which policy language around the public good was largely displaced by competition, consumer choice and individual returns.
The result is now difficult to deny. Even Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee warned years ago that the Department for Education was treating higher education as a market that was “not working in the interests of students or taxpayers”. It found more competition, more marketing and more consumer rhetoric, but no clear evidence that this had improved educational quality. Instead of universities being stewards of a public mission, they were pushed to behave like rival firms chasing enrolment, brand visibility and fee income.
That quasi-market has since become financially brittle. In England, the undergraduate fee cap rose in 2025/26 for the first time since 2017, moving from £9,250 to £9,535, precisely because inflation had eroded the value of tuition income. Yet the increase barely masks the scale of the crisis. The Office for Students reported in 2025 that the sector had suffered a third consecutive annual financial decline, and that 45.2% of providers were forecasting a deficit in 2024/25. In a harsher downside scenario, 170 providers could be in deficit by 2025/26.
So universities have reached for the one revenue stream the state left relatively unconstrained: international students. In 2023/24 there were 732,285 overseas students in UK higher education, comprising 23% of the total student body. Their fee income reached £12.1 billion, also about 23% of total university income. That is not a marginal supplement; it is a structural dependency. And once institutions become dependent on uncapped overseas fees to patch domestic underfunding, education starts to look less like a public service and more like an export business.
This is where the agent economy enters. As universities intensified the global recruitment race, a sprawling intermediary market grew around them. British Council-backed guidance states that the UK Agent Quality Framework applies to licensed student sponsors that use recruitment agents, but this is a standards framework, not a substitute for hard regulation. A Guardian investigation found universities paying agents between £2,000 and £8,000 per student, with the University of Greenwich spending more than £28.7 million in 2022/23 on agent commissions and related costs, and De Montfort paying £17.1 million. When the middlemen are thriving while students mortgage family savings for uncertain futures, something has gone badly wrong.
The moral problem is not that agents exist. Some provide legitimate guidance. The problem is that the incentives now run in the wrong direction. When institutions are under financial pressure, the temptation is to maximise volume first and ask harder questions later. Recent reporting has described how some international students arrive in Britain weighed down by debt, unrealistic expectations and misleading promises about work, living costs and life after graduation. In that system, students are not treated primarily as learners. They are treated as units of revenue.
The cruelty of the present model is that it extracts from both ends. It takes heavily from international students through high fees and agent-mediated recruitment, then offers them a more uncertain policy environment on arrival. The government’s 2025 immigration white paper proposed cutting the Graduate visa from two years to 18 months and exploring a 6% levy on international student fee income. At the same time, some universities reportedly tightened or restricted recruitment from countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh because of tougher compliance rules and higher visa refusal rates. Students are welcomed when balance sheets need them and treated as risk when politics does not.
Britain cannot keep describing higher education as a noble national asset while funding it like a distressed marketplace. A serious system would restore the idea that universities are public institutions, not merely competing brands; that students are scholars, not customers; and that international recruitment must be ethical, transparent and subordinate to academic integrity, not survivalist accounting. The UK still has world-class universities. But unless it breaks with the logic of permanent marketisation, it will keep producing the same degraded outcome: institutions in deficit, agents in profit, and students left carrying the risk.
The author is a legal professional currently student of L.L.M at Univerity of Law, London.
