Good News/Bad News
New Education Policy Implications
Press Release
The Ministry of Immigration and Integration under Minister Morten Bødskov issued a press release on 23rd June.
- Jan–May 2026: ~50 education residence permits issued to Nepali and Bangladeshi nationals combined
- Same period 2025: ~800 — a drop of roughly 94%
- The ministry attributes this to tightening measures rolled out over the past two years
- In full year 2025, 1,109 Bangladeshis and 786 Nepalis received student permits in Denmark
- The ministry’s stated reason for the crackdown: suspected abuse of the student permit scheme as a backdoor to the Danish labour market, compounded by large numbers of family members gaining residence and work permits on the back of a student permit
Policy changes already in force
- 2 May 2025: Third-country nationals at non-state-approved institutions lose the right to work alongside their studies and to a post-study job-search period; family reunification (spouses and children) removed for students at those institutions
- 15 October 2025: National ID Centre (NIDC) given expanded cross-authority role to help universities verify foreign applicants’ educational documents
Announced but not yet law
Family reunification to be removed for students at state-approved institutions too; post-study job-search period to be significantly shortened.
Previously on…
We have covered this story previously on Data in Denmark, as the policy announcements were made. You can get yourself up-to-date at the following links.
Good News/Bad News
I was curious about the data in the press release so I analysed all resident permit data for third country students since 2024. There are some other interesting effects that I would like to take you through.
First before I get started. The Ministry only identified two countries (Nepal and Bangladesh) and one type of education residence permit (study). There are four other permit categories, and looking at those numbers in total, there were 2000 education resident permits for Bangladeshi and Nepalese nationals in 2025 and 200 in 2026.
It is remarkable but perhaps less impressive than 800 to 50.
The time period chosen is curious (Jan-May) because peak student arrival is July and August for non-western students.
There were reductions in educational resident permits from other third country nationals in the same time. Comparing just education permits Jan to May 2025-Jan-May 2026.
Western 1,947 → 2,134
Non-Western 1,764 → 911
G20 2,566 → 2,718
Non-G20 1,145 → 327
G7 1,953 → 2,145
Non-G7 1,758 → 900
Global North 2,227 → 2,460
Global South 1,484 → 585
Specifically, the policy change seems to have hit China and India particularly hard.
Looking at all types of study permits, there are also huge effects in the number of foreign nationals from Uganda, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iran…
No one suggested that students from those countries were trying to enter the Danish labour market through the backdoor. As far as I know, they are thought of as legitimate students.
This national policy seems at odds with the kommunernes policies to attract and retain international workforce. International students are an excellent way to recruit future workers, as by the time they reach the job market they will have learned some Danish and maybe already had study jobs in the Danish working context. Having fewer of them frustrates that goal.
If the aim was to depress numbers of Asian and African students in general, then that ought to have been the political conversation, as this is the actual downstream effect we are seeing.
We will know more in October when the July-September data drops. Stay tuned, I guess!
You can explore the data yourself to your heart’s content on
https://student-permits-dk.streamlit.app/ :an app I built for this analysis.
If you’re all like, “wow, that’s amazing. She got the press release on the 23rd, made the app on the 25th and wrote it all up the next day, published it less than a week after the Ministry press release. I wish I had someone like that on my side, asking good questions, creating tools to generate genuinely useful insights and writing about it all in an accessible and understandable style”, then I have more good news for you: I am actually looking for paid work.
It could be a short-term contract with one quick problem or a longer-term thing. Get in touch and we can figure it out.
If you don’t have a job to offer me but you would like to support the work I am doing in open source analysis all the same, there are paid subscriptions available or you can make a one-off contribution if you don’t want to get into anything long-term with me.
Data sources
All figures are derived from Statistics Denmark (Danmarks Statistik) via Statbank.dk:
VAN66 — annual residence permits by citizenship and permit type, 2021–2023
VAN77M — monthly residence permits by citizenship and permit type, January 2024–present
The Western/Non-Western split uses the Danish statistical definition: EU27 + EEA/European microstates + Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand.
The data and code behind this analysis are public domain (CC0) at https://github.com/KellyDRasmussen/student-permits-dk