Despite the challenges to travelling and indeed, to all industries that the COVID pandemic continues to ravage, an interesting statistic derived from Bloomsberg is that the number of Chinese applicants to UK universities now outweighs those from the EU. Whilst this might well highlight the effect of Brexit, it is also the result of increasing relations with China. With EU applicants dropping 43% to 28,400, Chinese applicant numbers stand at 28,490, being a number that has more than doubled since 2017.
South China Morning Post reports similar shifts in applications to UK universities, but weighting reasons for this on UK higher education benefitting from tensions between US and China. It also asserts that the number of students from mainland China studying in UK education has more than doubled in the last decade.
Another mainland Chinese publication, Global Times, echoes the link to US-Chinese relations and that the shift is caused by visa restrictions from the US on Chinese students and also the UK’s attempts to maintain normal cultural exchanges. Global Times goes on to quote figures from the Chinese Embassy in the UK that around 216,000 Chinese students are now studying in the UK, whilst Universities UK has that figure at circa 140,000. Either way, both figures are high and all news outlets point toward unwavering confidence in the English language and the UK’s education system.
