Charlie Jeffery opinion piece October 2025
The Yorkshire Post published this opinion piece on Friday 17 October 2025.
You can read a transcript below.
UK Trade Mission - placing higher education at the heart of our economic growth strategy
Universities are one of the UK’s top export industries, not far behind the motor industry and medical and pharmaceutical products exports.
That may be a surprise to many. We still tend to think of exports as tangible products. However, university exports are about ideas and knowledge. These include international research funding, the commercial use of research that attracts foreign investors, and, most importantly, international students who study both in the UK and at our overseas branch campuses.
The students who study in-person in the UK make the biggest export contribution - not just their university fees, but also the money they spend here on accommodation and other everyday expenses. Every pound spent by international students in the UK is an export pound.
In 2022, the UK Government estimated an export value from all this of £32 billion. So it is no surprise that universities were among the best-represented export sectors in the Prime Minister’s trade mission to Mumbai in India last week.
The trade mission had a number of special themes: a deal to bring production of three Bollywood movies to the UK, a UK-India CEO summit, the opening of an English Premier League office in Mumbai, and a special event with the two Prime Ministers to mark the plans of nine UK universities to set up campuses in India, including the University of York campus which will open its doors in Mumbai in August 2026.
India has twenty per cent of the world’s population of people aged 25 or under. India’s New Economic Education Policy wants half of that cohort to access university education to deliver the workforce skills to become the world’s largest economy in the next decade. But it doesn't have the domestic capacity to supply that much university education.
Those nine UK campuses will help bridge that gap with high quality higher education. Our presence on the UK trade mission recognised both what we can do to help meet Modi’s ambitions - but also how we can further grow our export contribution to the UK economy.
This is a huge opportunity for Yorkshire: so how does a campus in Mumbai impact us here?
Well, the University of York campus in Mumbai will grow to educate several thousand students a year in one of the most dynamic cities in the world, help to build further interest across India in studying here in York, extend our research strengths in areas of economic importance in Mumbai like the creative industries, health systems, biotechnology and AI, and cross-fertilise what we learn from education in research in India with what we do in York.
Ours is a model of mutuality; the cornerstone of any trading relationship. We will add value through what we do in and for Mumbai and India, and that will enhance what we do in the UK, bringing in more export value to York and the UK.
But there is a catch. At the same time as our contribution to exports and trade was being marked in the Prime Minister’s trade mission, the government is also considering a levy on international student fees in the UK, a home-grown tax on university export income.
Recent modelling has shown this levy would have the effect of reducing international student numbers in the UK by around 80,000 over five years at a cost of £2.2B in reduced export value.
Promoting university exports in a trade mission to India while planning to tax them at home doesn’t make much sense. The danger is that the government ends up shooting one of its top export industries in the foot. Or we could borrow from India’s playbook and place higher education at the heart of our economic growth strategy.