Calls for foreign students to be excluded from immigration figures were branded "absurd" and "silly" by Home Office minister Damian Green on Tuesday.
In a strongly-worded riposte to university chancellors and some fellow Conservatives, the Immigration Minister said the idea "doesn't accord with any kind of common sense".
Damian Green has rejected calls for net migration figures to be changed in order to exclude students
There have been reports that Universities Minister David Willetts has been privately lobbying for students not to be counted as immigrants in the Government's push to reduce net immigration to the tens of thousands by 2015.
Tory MP Jo Johnson, a parliamentary private secretary in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills which covers universities, has also raised concerns about curbing the number of students coming to the UK.
Prime Minister David Cameron has been urged by university chancellors, governors and presidents to class students as temporary rather than permanent immigrants in line with its international competitors in higher education.
Appearing before the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee, Green repeated his previous criticism of the idea as an attempt to "fiddle the figures" and "redefine our way out of a problem".
But he also went on to the offensive against what he called "very clever people" advancing a "frankly silly" idea.
"I think there is a wider point, which is to say that someone who comes here for three years as a student is not here and doesn't count is absurd," he told MPs.
"Nobody is arguing that somebody who comes here to work for two years or 18 months isn't an immigrant - of course they are an immigrant.
"So to say people who come here for longer aren't immigrants just because they have got a student visa just seems to me to be frankly silly, and it's the sort of silly argument that's often most passionately put by very clever people, and that's what we are getting in this case."
He dismissed the suggestion that people arriving in Britain on student visas had less impact on public services than foreign workers.
"They are living somewhere, so they are having an impact on housing. They will be taking public transport. If they are here for three years it's quite likely they will use the health service," he said.
"So all the immigration pressures on the public services that we all know about are as affected by an individual student as they are by an individual on a work permit.
"So I think this whole debate is a complete dead end because it doesn't accord with any kind of common sense."
Green refused to say what representations he had received from his ministerial colleagues at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
"Ministers discuss policy all the time but sensible ministers don't discuss private policy discussions in public," he said.
"We all have views on our own policies and other people's policies but as I say it's sensible for ministers to keep these discussions private."