Yeah, as I understand it, student visas have one of the biggest GDP multipliers of any visa type (second only to the Tier 1 Investor). It's reckoned that the window allowing you to stay on after graduation for long enough to find a good job on a subsequent employment visa is a large part of that.

Unfortunately, it's also one of the easiest types to fiddle with when people start screaming about immigrants / the evils of student housing / etc - prospective overseas students don't have nearly as many people willing to speak up for them as people with employment offers or who have family members already in the UK.

Hence this scheme intended to reduce the supply of places, the 'visa brake' under Starmer, and all the wild variations in policy under the previous Tory governments. We've not really been able to find any sort of happy medium since Brexit, and in the meantime - as you rightly point out in some of your other comments - it's the universities that are being harmed.