Higher education staff and Brexit. Is the UK losing the youngest and brightest from other EU countries?

ABSTRACT

Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, and the formal act of triggering article 50 by Theresa May’s cabinet in 2017, the UK has entered a period of negotiations, the outcome of which, and also the terms of the post-exiting phase, are still uncertain. In this period of uncertainty, the mobility of people is one of the main issues at stake. The topic is important for the higher education sector where the percentage of (other) European Union staff in UK universities has grown at an impressive rate in recent years before the Brexit referendum. This paper draws from official Higher Education Statistic Agency (HESA) data to investigate if there is any inversion of this trend in the British system, arguing that some ‘Brexodus’ of academic staff – meaning a decrease in the percentage of other EU nationals – has already started for some academics, namely the youngest and the brightest.

KEYWORDS:

• Career
• staff recruitment and retention
• mobility
• Brexit
• United Kingdom
• internationalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/M010082/1].