Thinking of coming to the UK to study?
Don't.
The universities are fine, but the visa system is a nightmare and getting worse. Successive governments have targeted students to score anti-immigrant political points.
This may be incredibly disruptive to your studies. If they cancel your visa in the middle or give you one with a shorter duration than your degree and then decide not to renew it, you will not be refunded for the time or money spent for your studies up to that point.
The Tories did this because their core voters are people who own small businesses and suburban houses but who have not been to university - the nation of shop keepers.
Middle class people who have been to university, by contrast, tend* to favour things like human rights and justice. Tories saw universities as places that turned people into Labour voters. But universities are major employers. There are a lot of places in the UK where the local university is really important for the local economy or cultural scene. Most voters would not like a policy of fucking over unis because they do understand that our service economy absolutely depends on them.
So instead Tories fucked up uni funding in several ways. They already depended on foreign students, but Tories made that much more important and them immediately set about demonising students as migrants.
To understand Tory policy, imagine that you don't care if the entire country is giant slag heap as long as you have biggest house on the heap.
And for Starmer, his entire vision is to be much more efficient at slag heap delivery.
* These are wide generalisations and not universally applicable. White middle class people are often insulated from needing an analysis of things happening and so many never learn how. Ideally, this kind of analysis is part of the curriculum at most unis. Tories think it's absent in STEM (which is often fair) and that's part of why STEM programs continue to receive funding.
@celesteh @budududuroiu the way I look at it:
The Tories say they want to reduce migration but what (a faction of them) are really most interested in is eroding the status of migrants to make them easier to exploit. So EU migration gets replaced with very restrictive work visas etc which is not incompatible with an increase in net migration.
Reform actually wants to reduce migration (or more accurately, the number of non white people in the UK) and this appeals to the solid 20% of the population who are very racist.
Labour implements their proposed policies on both fronts.
Or as Sivandan put it:
"What Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after."
Charles ☭ 
is a Green
Bogdan Buduroiu
catch