A British education is prized all over the Indian subcontinent. Despite the anti-colonial and almost anti-British view of history that school textbooks in India propagate, studying in England retains vast prestige. The foremost leaders of the country’s anti-colonial pantheon were all educated here – Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, you name it.
Young people from the subcontinent tend to be highly motivated and go on to excel in some of the top universities in Britain. However, as British economist Joan Robinson said, whatever you can say rightly about India, the opposite is also true.
In the last two years, there has been a massive influx of Indians with student visas into England who are here not so much to study as to drudge. Vast numbers of young Indians who have entered the island since 2021 have used their student status as merely a back-door to working here. Even though the Home Office allows full-time students to work only 20 hours a week, this rule is flouted as many work in informal sectors and are paid in cash.
Scores of these youngsters come to this country as postgraduates, manage to find bog-standard ersatz universities in Britain where they secure admission through the help of extortionate middlemen ‘agencies’ based in India, make their way here and find work stacking shelves, delivering food, bartending and also serve as general factotums in ethnic restaurants. Because they work informally, it is easy for employers to exploit them and pay them ridiculously low wages. A home office raid found employee conditions approximating modern slavery in a south Indian restaurant in Wembley where workers were paid about £5 an hour.
While working during the course of one’s studies itself is perfectly fine, making it the sole purpose of coming to the U.K. is pernicious, both to the putative students and this country. ‘Doing part-time’ has become so rife amongst Indian circles in Britain that social media pages have sprung up in several Indian languages documenting the lives of recent arrivals who eke out a living from menial jobs. A small business owner in Lewisham looked aghast at me when I said “I don’t” when he asked where I was working part-time while a student at the LSE.
Third-rate universities in the U.K. are also to blame for creating a teeming class of pseudo-students by paving an easy path for them to come to this country. A look at their entry requirements are revealing. Leeds Beckett University, which ranks 102nd in the U.K., expects its Master’s applicants from India to have only a 2:2 from an Indian college. What’s more, it wants them to score a mere 6.0 in the standardised IELTS English test. London South Bank University, ranked 96th, does not even mandate an English test and accepts English grades an applicant scored in an Indian high school.
Even though the value of degrees from these universities is highly questionable, they boast of a significant body of international students. The University of Roehampton, ranked 111th, says 14% of its students are international and “warmly welcomes a healthy cohort of Indian students each year”. This is because people who apply to study here are not interested in the degree as much as the lucre to be accrued from exploiting the student status. Indian students have even resuscitated some moribund colleges in England. According to the Economist, about a quarter of all students in the University of East London (UEL) are from India, which previously drew its pupils from only three boroughs in London.
What happens after their student visa expires? Here comes the graduate visa, which grants foreign graduates from U.K. universities two years leave to live and work in the U.K. Finally, the pseudo-students can do overtly what they’ve been doing covertly through the length of their degree. I have personally seen many Indians in the U.K. who pass a Master’s degree of dubious value from an obscure university, secure the graduate visa and continue to work as Deliveroo or Uber Eats drivers, cleaners and bartenders. Not surprisingly, 41.4% of all graduate visas were granted to Indians last year.
The only party that benefits from students coming to the U.K. to go to third-rate universities are those universities. They revel in foreign cash as they dole out useless degrees to pretty much anyone who wants it. They churn out foreign graduates that go on to take up blue-collar jobs for which they did not require a degree qualification, taking away those jobs from a local unemployed British person.
It is time, therefore, to crack down on graduate visas to Indian students who don’t go to the top universities in the U.K. Australia blazed the trail this year banning student visas to students from certain Indian states as they were found to be dropping out quickly to work. But why just Indians? The sheer numbers speak for themselves. Indian students surpassed Chinese as the largest group of foreign students in the U.K. last year at 139,539 pupils or more than a quarter of all international students. As noted already, they also secure the largest share of graduate visas. Allowing them untrammelled access to the country even though they take Mickey Mouse degrees, in lowly institutions and are not here to study anyway is perilous. It makes a mockery of student visas, diminishes the prestige of a British education and perpetuates the excessive dependence of universities on foreign cash.
Restricting graduate visas to graduates of Russell Group universities will mean that only those who are sincere about studying will come here, which is what Britain must aim for – attracting the best.
Whitehall considered a similar plan last year, but it was dropped because of the unholy degree of dependence on foreign students of U.K. universities. Without an annual influx of Indian students, places like the University of East London would go bust. An educational system that leans so heavily on foreign students, particularly when they are just gaming the system to obtain visas, isn’t fit for purpose.
Aditya is a writer and has a Master’s in International Relations from the London School of Economics (LSE). Find him on X (Twitter).
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