Does the UK gain a net economic benefit from international higher education students?

The headline figure — a benefit-to-cost ratio pitched at nearly ten to one — was designed to be unanswerable, yet the chamber answered it only narrowly, with yes edging it 43 to 35. When a number this stark still splits a room close to down the middle, the vote is really about something the spreadsheet can't capture: whether fee income and cultural exchange offset pressure on housing, visas and public services.

The generational pattern is the tell. The oldest voters, those 65 and over, came down almost unanimously for yes, while the 35-54 cohort tilted the other way, the only stretch of the electorate to do so. That's a reversal of the usual immigration split, where it's typically younger voters who are most relaxed about newcomers; here it looks like the retired, insulated from graduate-labour-market competition and campus-town housing costs, found it easiest to bank the economic upside, while those in the thick of family finances and job markets weighed the trade-offs more warily.

It's a small-scale echo of the wider tension in British immigration politics since 2016 — the gap between an aggregate national benefit, however large, and the localised costs felt in rents, school places and NHS waiting lists. Ministers can quote the £40 billion; sceptics can still point to the visible strain in university towns.

That the case with the best numbers in Whitehall could still only carry the day by ten points says more about the politics of immigration than about the economics of education.