Back in September 2021, pre-pandemic and five Tory Education ministers** ago, a blog shortly after the restoration of post-study work visas reflected how this might be a factor in the party’s continuing tensions around immigration . Suella Braverman’s speech to the party conference this week highlighted that the issue still exists and suggest a fault line through which university hopes for international student recruitment could fall. It is not surprising that vested interests in higher education, who have been licking their lips at enrollment growth, have responded so vigorously.
With a bit of a mind flip, You’re into the time slip
Among the first in line for the defence was ApplyBoard Advisory Board Chairman, Jo Johnson, who also leads the company’s UK Advisory Board and its worthies in helping build the company’s business in the UK. He was interestingly narrow in his choice of words and vaunted the importance of international students “..if we want to be a science superpower.” It’s an echo of the original announcement from Priti Patel, in September 2019, which said the new Graduate Route ‘will mean talented international students, whether in science and maths or technology and engineering, can study in the UK…’
The suspicious might think that this continues to lay the groundwork for a downgrading of the humanities or some form of quota system that favours the sciences above humanities when it comes to dishing out visas. Almost inevitably that would play to the interests of the established hierarchy of universities with their lion’s share of science funding and students. Those who don’t think these hierarchies have any place in Government policy, or that Ministers won’t allow league tables to distort thinking, would do well to remember that the High Potential Individual visa is currently restricted to graduates of 37 universities who have successfully navigated, manipulated or, for some, misrepresented their way into two of three nominated global rankings.
It’s just a jump to the left, And then a step to the right
Back in May 2022 when the High Potential Individual visa was launched, then Chancellor Rishi Sunak (remember him) was proud it helped “to create one of the world’s most attractive visa regimes for entrepreneurs and highly skilled people.” This seems to have been a little too much of an open door for some and there are reports of the Home Office beginning a review of the number of dependants accompanying international students studying in the UK. The numbers tell their own story with study visas up 71% from 2019 to 2022 while dependants have gone up over five times.
Perhaps helpfully, if they are looking for beneficial treatment in the future, the Russell Group institutions may be able to argue that it is universities outside their club that are driving the change. As noted in a February 2022 blog the RG universities were growing numbers from China while other universities were taking the opportunities afforded by growth from India and Nigeria as source markets. This may be important in formulating Home Office thinking because the Telegraph reported that “34,000 Nigerian students accounted for 31,898 dependants while the 93,100 Indian students accounted for 24,916.”
The siren voices on the right are unlikely to let the issue rest. Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: “It has been clear for years that a significant number of those coming to study and their dependants use it as a route into work and settlement. It is yet another mode of uncontrolled and uncapped migration, often, feeding the demand for low-skilled and low-paid workers.” It is a level of angst that seems likely to note that the top non-EU nationalities granted British citizenship in the latest year were Indian (16,720), Pakistani (15,624), and Nigerian (9,445) nationals and that these nationalities accounted for almost a third (31%) of all grants to non-EU nationals in the year ending June 2022.
Not for very much longer, I’ve got to keep control
The clues are all there in Braverman’s conference speech but the key word is control which appears six times in 18 sentences and particularly in terms the mission “to control our borders.” The economy is to be developed by “..encouraging business to invest in capital and domestic labour. Not relying wholly on low-skilled foreign workers.” The echo of Mehmet’s words above are probably no accident.
But then we are taken back to Theresa May’s statement of March 2011 where she said, “We had too many people coming here to work and not to study. We had too many foreign graduates staying on in the UK to work in unskilled jobs. And we had too many institutions selling immigration, not education.” It was the precursor to removal of post study work visas and a moment when international student growth in the UK began to fall rapidly behind that of Australia and Canada.
By January 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron was telling the House of Commons, ‘Frankly, there are lots of people in our country desperate for jobs. We don’t need the brightest and best of students to come here and then do menial jobs.’ The real point was that PSW visas had been introduced in the UK in 2002 when unemployment was around 5% but it then rose rapidly due to the global economic recession. A big question facing UK higher education now will be what happens in summer 2023 if the UK unemployment rate, particularly among graduates, looks to be going the wrong way at a point when a General Election is no more than 18 months away.
It is perhaps as well for universities that the traditional measure of graduate employment is aimed at the undergraduate market but it may not be long before attention focuses on the fate of postgraduates entering a tricky job market. The shift in balance to having India as a major driver of international enrollments has altered the dynamics and it is slightly odd, but hardly unexpected given their record, that the OsF has not caught up with the situation. With increasing numbers of international student likely to stay and take advantage of post-study work the likelihood of competition in the postgraduate market seems obvious.
It may seem far-fetched to consider this as a potential problem at a point when the unemployment rate fell to its lowest rate since 1974 just three months ago but the headline hides a more complex picture. Craig Erlam, a senior market analyst at Oanda, commented, “It’s not often that you see the unemployment rate fall to the lowest in almost 50 years and aren’t overjoyed, but that will certainly be the feeling at the Bank of England right now.” Unemployment rising to 8% looks unlikely but it is also difficult to find anyone who predicting in December 2021 that average two-year fixed mortgage rates would have moved from 2.43% to 6% in less than a year with every likelihood of going higher.
But it’s the pelvic thrust, That really drives you insane
The sub-heading offers a slightly crude metaphor for the way that competitors in the international student market, particularly Australia, might take the opportunity to build on the UK’s uncertainties, tensions and failure to take advantage of its early opening of borders. The announcement of new post-study work rights has already swamped the claims of Sunak’s claims of an attractive visa regime and it comes with AUS$36 million to improve visa processing for international students. It’s the type of coordinated decision making and rhetoric that becomes it much easier to point out the potential problems in the UK.
Canada, which is not without its own problems, has also announced plans to increase the number of international students and foreign workers with extensive work experience for permanent residency in areas where there is a persistent labour shortage. A sub-text is that provinces and territories will have the freedom to modify their immigration streams to suit their own requirements. That’s just a little more steam in the Canadian engine that has become an international student recruiting freight train.
While hoping for the best and that sense will prevail, it is difficult not to think that the current Government is disjointed, capable of extreme views and likely to pander to populist thinking as an election nears. It has shown little regard for the concerns of universities or the predicament they might face if international students decline and the institutions have willingly driven recruitment at a pace which has brought new stresses on the system. None of it bodes well for the future and particularly not if the predictions of a long and deep recession come true.
NOTES
* Headline and sub-headings from Time Warp by Richard O’Brien/Richard Hartley, which featured in the 1973 rock musical The Rocky Horror Show, its 1975 film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a 2016 TV production. If you haven’t done it you really should.
**Gavin Williamson (to 15 September 2021), Nadhimm Zahawi (to 5 July, 2022), Michelle Donelan (to 7 July, 2022), James Cleverly (to 6 September, 2022), Kit Malthouse (current but the record might suggest not by the time you read this…)