Australia is poised to overtake the UK as the second most popular global destination for international students, according to a new analysis. The research, based on international student enrolment figures from round the world, says that it’s likely that Australia has already outstripped the UK in terms of the number of overseas students from outside Europe and suggests that the UK’s position as the top destination for continental European students is also “about to be decimated by Brexit”.

The result, it concludes, is that “Australia may have surpassed the UK in 2018” in terms of total international student numbers in higher education, and “if not will almost certainly do so in 2019”. The US is comfortably the top destination for international students.

The paper, The UK in the Global Student Market: Second Place for How Much Longer? from Simon Marginson, director of the Centre for Global Higher Education at University College London (UCL), was published on July 19 and draws on data from Unesco and the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency. Unesco figures on incoming international students from all parts of the world show that the UK was comfortably ahead of Australia in 2015 (the most recent year for which it has data) with 431,000 overseas students, compared with 294,000 in the Antipodean nation.

However, examining the data over time shows that the gap between the two countries has narrowed substantially, with international student numbers growing by just 2.6 percent between 2011-2015 in the UK and by 12.1 percent in Australia over the same period.

Prof. Marginson blames the UK’s waning appeal to non-European Union international students on the government running a post-study work visa regime that is much less attractive than that on offer in Canada, Australia and, until recently, the US. “It is this, not Brexit, which will ensure that the UK moves down to number three in the global student market in 2018 or 2019. Later, however, Brexit will compound the decline in the UK’s global position by driving UK numbers further down,” he predicts.