Despite the significant and increasing presence of international students in the United Kingdom, on a national level there has been a lack of formal policy towards international students. Instead, in policy discourse, international students are represented in economic terms to the exclusion of other dimensions of experience and action. This article seeks to describe and challenge these discursive representations of international students in the United Kingdom's national policy environments. It takes a critical linguistic approach to analysing two texts representative of Coalition policy discourses. The choices of vocabulary, grammar and the content reveal three key assumptions: that education is a marketplace; that the primary value of students is financial; and that students are independent consumers, not influenced by education agents. These assumptions are argued to derive from neo-liberal ideological influences, which oversimplify interactions between international students, host countries and education agents by relying on a market-based discourse. Alternative discourses are needed to challenge these assumptions of policy discourse in the United Kingdom.