The UK is also home to 4 of the top 10 institutes worldwide, according to the QS World Rankings 2023. The institutions across the UK focus on well-rounded development and provide students with a healthy educational environment while preparing them for success in the increasingly globalised world. International students have since time immemorial been an integral part of the UK cultural and educational communities. Their talent has nurtured many volunteer groups, start-ups and some of the biggest companies across sectors. While the UK benefits from this exchange of knowledge and skills, due to the restrictions imposed by the post-study work visa, retaining these students has always been a challenge due to sponsorship issues.
According to research by Universities UK International (UUKi), 83% of international graduates attribute their ability to find employment to their UK degree. The high level of instruction and demanding academic standards at universities in the UK provide students with an edge in the job market.
The UK post-study work visa policy has proved to be a proverbial ‘cherry on the cake’ as it has made the UK more attractive for Indian students. According to the new rules, students who have completed a degree in the UK are now allowed to stay in the country for two years after graduation, to work or find a job (three years for PhD students).
According to data published by the Irish Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, between January 1 and March 31 of this year, a total of 7,264 work permits were issued to third-country citizens, 2,894 of which to were given to Indian nationals. In January alone, 2,525 permits were issued, out of which Indians accounted for 1,059 permits.
Work visa a decade ago was anti-immigration rhetoric
NISAU UK Chairperson Sanam Arora spoke to the newsweekly at length about the vision, status and future of the post-study work visa for international students in the UK.
Arora said there’s a lot to unpack there. According to her, the removal of a post-study work visa a decade ago was anti-immigration rhetoric. “Fundamentally, from our perspective, what Indian students were telling us was, that they just wanted a post-study work visa,” Sanam told us. She mentioned that there is research to back this up which was commissioned five-six years ago to them by the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to understand the concerns and expectations of Indian students in the UK.
Sanam added, “We did some more research during the Covid pandemic, looking at the future of Indian students and their requirements so many years apart. You can say one is at the end of the decade and another is at the other end of the decade.
“The one thing that is consistent and about 70 to 75 per cent of Indian students tell us is that the number one reason they choose the UK as a study destination is because of the availability of a post-study work visa, which is reflected in the number of students now choosing to come to the UK. So it's been three years since the post-study work visa was introduced.”
In 2019, the UK brought back what was previously known as the post-study visa, now “Graduate visa”, which allows international students to stay in the UK for at least two years after completing their degree.
The British High Commission granted 127,000 student visas to Indians between September 2021-2022, an increase of 273 per cent over the same period in 2018-2019, it revealed in November 2022. Indian student numbers in the UK skyrocketed in lieu of post-study graduate work visas. This number drastically increased because of the high demand for the UK Graduate visa as well as a backlog of applications due to the pandemic. Experts and educationists estimate that student visa applications from India could be five to six times the number of visas that were issued, i.e. between 6,300,00 and 7,600,00 applications.
Today, Indian students form one of the largest student groups in the UK. With a 96% approval rate for student visas, about 160,970 Indians have received student visas for the UK in the year ending September 2022 alone, which is a considerable increase of 78% compared to the previous year when the total visas issued was 90,669 and 330% higher compared to the same period in 2019.
As a part of NISAU UK’s campaign ‘Fair Visa Fair Chance’, Sanam and her team had proposed a set of recommendations to the UK government, all of which were accepted. Sanam called it a very solution-oriented approach that looked at everybody's requirements. She further added, “The recommendations we made addressed the concerns of the UK government, about the concern of abuse of post-study-work visas in the past, which should not be seen as a backdoor to long-term immigration.
NISAU UK was able to distil and present to the government that students didn’t necessarily want to settle and most of them wanted global work experience after their education so that they could set themselves apart in the labour market. “Whether that labour market was in the Western world or back home in India, they wanted to be able to set themselves apart. They wanted local work experience so they could learn fundamentally,” she said.
On the one hand, students want this post-study work visa to be able to secure the global work experience that they desire. “I remember too many of them said they wanted to return because you know, home is home,” Sanam told the newsweekly. The government did not want any abuse of student visas or any bogus colleges to operate in the name of bringing students over, so one key recommendation NISAU UK put forward was that the visa should have a time constraint - two years.
The billion-dollar question
But is the post-study work visa working out for students? Sanam and her team are going to commission research now because they feel we are at the point where there should be enough data floating and above anecdotal evidence that should be enough for quantitative analysis of the success of this scheme.
One of the positives of this visa scheme so far is that it allows students to not only take up a job but also don't have the pressure to take an unsponsored route, which means that they don't need to have a job in order to be able to stay in the country. They can stay in the country and look for a job because they get this visa. Sanam thinks it also helps promote the idea of entrepreneurship among students who can start their own businesses, and their own startups while they're on this visa because we need more job makers and job givers than job takers as well.
The challenges
Sanam told the newsweekly that a lot of students are telling her that employers still don't know that this visa exists, or they haven't been told enough. This might also include SMEs, unlike larger employers.
This visa scheme according to Sanam, also helps CEOs in increasing diversity and inclusion in their businesses and neurodiversity. The larger question is whether employers have actually been encouraged to hire more such students or not.
“So we've opened the gates for people, but now we need to find them meaningful work, not just any job we need to find them meaningful work. If education is not translating into employability and by employability it doesn't just mean having a job. It means developing the skills to be able to land jobs and starting your own businesses,” Sanam told Asian Voice.
The more known yet imperative point remains that a lot of students take some very expensive loans when they come to the UK, so working for two years even at the base minimum wage rate in the UK, should be able to help start to repay some of those loans.
“Where I think we need to make things simpler for students is to be able to educate employers and encourage them to take on more international students through the post-study work visa. We need to make it simpler for them to then switch to another visa type. Similarly, we need to be able to look at employers’ concerns about whether they want to train someone and invest all the training for two years when they're going to go back eventually. What if we were to give a smooth transition to employers to say if you want to retain talent after the expiration of the visa, we as the UK are going to be going to make it easy for you to do so? And that's absolutely something we should do,” Sanam said.
“We're sitting in one of the most knowledge-intensive economies in the world. The UK Government has ambitious targets to become a knowledge, one of the superpowers in terms of knowledge economies, but we've got to create the ecosystem, you know, that works 360 degrees to support very talented people coming over from India or elsewhere. The post-study work visa is one of what I see as core building blocks to be for that ecosystem. More needs to be done, but this is actually the base minimum and we need to simplify things and educate employers about the benefits of hiring international students,” she signed off.
Post-study work visa is far more reliable
Paras Fatnani, Chief Strategy Officer of SEED Global Education, a UK-based higher education marketing & strategy consulting firm that empowers universities and b-schools to build their presence & outreach in emerging markets like India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya amongst others spoke to Asian Voice about the post-study work visa.
Talking about the future entail for candidates who finish two years of work experience, Paras said, “Since September 2019, international students are allowed to stay in the UK for 2 years post their degree completion to explore job opportunities. After the 2-year post-study work visa period expires, graduates are expected to apply for a Tier 2 visa aimed at skilled workers. 54% of the work visas granted in 2022 were under Tier 2 for ‘Skilled Worker’ and ‘Skilled Worker – Health and Care’ of all work visas granted. Indians ranked the highest among both these categories. This shows how lucrative and beneficial the post-study work visa is for international students who are keen on getting an education in world-class universities but also working in a global setting.”
What do the numbers suggest in terms of UK-India student exchange? “In 2022, India overtook China as the top student resource with 139,539 visas issued predominantly due to the change in this policy resulting in aiding Indian students’ return on investment priorities. Programs like the UK-India Education and Research Initiative, and individual collaborations between the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Brunel University London, and ATLAS SkillTech University with the University of Bath and University of Bristol have encouraged the UK-India relations academically,” he said.
Addressing the benefits of the Young Professional Scheme (recently introduced by the UK government for Indians), Paras said, “While the Young Professional Scheme has fewer restrictions(mainly that you do not need to have a degree from a UK institution), the scheme works on a ballot system for a set number of visas every month which makes it unpredictable. Someone who may not have a UK degree can try their luck at this scheme, the two-year post-study work visa is far more reliable in the long run.”
