LONDON — When Britain started a program this
week offering a two-year visa to graduates from some top global universities,
Nikhil Mane, an Indian computer science student at New York University,
welcomed the news.
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“I was happy,” said Mane, 23, whose university was
on the list. “It’s a good way to pursue our dreams.”
More than 8,000km away, Adeola Adepoju, 22, a
biochemistry student at Olabisi Onabanjo University in Nigeria, also read the
announcement with great interest. But he had the opposite reaction.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Adepoju said. “No
university from the Third World is ranked.”
Britain’s “High Potential Individual” visa program
allows graduates from 37 top-rated world universities in Australia, Canada,
China, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and the US to come to the country
for two years even if they do not have a job offer.
A majority of universities on the list are in the
US, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and the University of California, San Diego.
The government said the plan would attract the
world’s “brightest and best” and benefit the British economy. Critics, however,
say the plan nurtures global inequalities and discriminates against most
developing countries.
The purpose of the policy is to create “a highly
desirable and able pool of mobile talent from which UK employers can recruit”
and drive economic growth and technological advances, the government said in
its announcement. It did not put a cap on the number of applicants who would be
accepted and said that graduates with doctorates would be allowed to stay for
three years.
“We want the businesses of tomorrow to be built here
today,” Rishi Sunak, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a
statement. “Come and join in!”
The program is in line with Britain’s post-Brexit
visa policy, which has made entry easier for high-skilled workers and harder
for those considered low-skilled ones, as well as asylum-seekers. Visa pathways
include a skilled-worker visa for people who have received a job offer in
Britain, a visa for people considered a “leader or potential leader” in certain
fields, and a program to allow international students who graduated from
British universities to stay for at least two years.
The new British visa has been praised in some academic
circles in the US as one to emulate. But many academics, students and
politicians in Britain, Africa, and India have spoken out against it, saying
that the universities that students attend are largely influenced by their
social and geographical circumstances and that the new scheme rewards those who
are already more privileged.
It’s very, very shocking to see that after that we are seeing the same sort of names, the same universities pop up, which will favor obviously a particular kind of privileged white person.
“I would not be eligible,” said Deepti Gurdasani, a
clinical epidemiologist and a senior lecturer in machine learning at Queen Mary
University of London, who went to a university in India that is not on the
list. “It is very hurtful to find that you’re devalued and that people within
your community are devalued because of arbitrary thresholds.”
Gurdasani said that as a student, she got one of
seven spots to study medicine at Christian Medical College in Vellore, India,
for which thousands of students competed. There, she received what she said was
rigorous training, seeing patients with very complex illnesses, including
infectious diseases, and building expertise that she then brought to Britain.
“We’ve seen the lack of this in the UK during the
COVID pandemic,” she said, “It’s very, very shocking to see that after that we
are seeing the same sort of names, the same universities pop up, which will
favor obviously a particular kind of privileged white person.”
Madeleine Sumption, director of the University of
Oxford’s Migration Observatory, which tracks immigration patterns, said the new
policy was an innovative idea, but with drawbacks.
“How do you decide who the highly skilled people
are?” she asked, adding that the current policy would admit someone who just
scraped through Harvard but not the highest-achieving students at a top Indian
university.
Introducing other criteria for assessing applicants,
such as grades, would be fair, she said, but much harder to enforce. “It’s very
convenient for the government to just have an institution be on the list or
not.”
Britain’s Home Office said the list had been
compiled from leading global university ranking lists and that new international
institutions could move up the ranks and later join the list.
However, university rankings are widely criticized
in many quarters, with critics saying they often fail to grasp the quality of
teaching and often overemphasize research over instruction.
Phil Baty, who is responsible for developing the
methodology of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which is
among those the British government used, said in a post on LinkedIn that “this
isn’t what we had in mind when creating the rankings.”
Zubaida Haque, executive director of Equality Trust,
a British charity, said that in offering the new visa, the British government
failed to grasp that race, class and financial barriers prevented many
deserving students from reaching top universities.
A 2017 study of Ivy League colleges, as well as
institutions like the University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke, most of
which are on the British visa list, showed that more students came from
families in the top 1 percent of income distribution in the US than the bottom
half.
“This scheme shows that the government does not
understand the systemic racial and class inequality in this country, and they
clearly do not understand it anywhere else,” Haque said. “It’s an elitist visa
scheme.”
She added that the program gave an unfair advantage
to those who needed it the least. “There is likely to be a good pipeline for
these graduates anyway,” she said.
Christopher Trisos, a senior researcher at the
African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town, said
that the program was also detrimental to Britain itself.
“If UK businesses and governments want to play a
role in addressing the biggest challenges of this century — energy access,
fighting climate change and pandemics — they need to be including skills and
knowledge from developing countries,” he said.
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