Mrs Theresa May,
It is unfortunate that you have such disgust for bright and talented foreign students. Not only do they pay extortionate fees already to study here, but you are threatening to deport them as soon as they finish their studies. This will put off many bright students from studying here, or from carrying out pioneering research here, and our universities will be worse off as a direct result of your incompetence.
A research paper from the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (June 2011) reported that in 2008-09, overseas tuition fee income was £2.4 billion, and this figure is expected to rise over the next 10 years. If you continue to demonise hard-working foreign students, they will not invest their tuition fees here. Can we really afford to lose such investment in our universities, who are already feeling the pressure of covering their costs and are pushing up tuition fees for our home students? Can we really afford to lose 40% of our postgraduate students and 50% of our full-time research students? Can we afford to lose our outstanding facilities and specialist courses? Can we afford to lose our status as one of the best countries for Higher Education? The impact of losing our international students will be catastrophic for our research centres, and will damage international links we have with vital export markets such as China, India and the USA.
Additionally, after investing time and effort into training these students, it makes absolutely no sense to send them away as soon as they finish their studies. These highly trained graduates and researchers would benefit our economy; they are not unskilled illegal immigrants or benefit scroungers. Graduates who stay after their studies invest in our economy, generate business and create jobs, support local communities, volunteer, pay taxes, and so on. It is astounding that you overlook the impact they have in supporting not only our economy, but our society as a whole.
To take just one key example: the NHS relies on foreign workers – there simply aren’t enough UK health staff to support our struggling health service. 11% of the total workforce in the NHS are not British, including 26% of doctors. The fact is that it takes several years to train UK doctors, and so we cannot solely rely on UK trainees. We must value the expertise that foreign students bring to workforce and economy, otherwise we will see more understaffed NHS hospitals and practices, with disastrous effects for health provision and standards in the UK.
And as for not allowing non-EU members to work in this country while they study… you have absolutely no sense of reality, do you?
I have extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to do an Erasmus placement as part of my four-year undergraduate degree. I lived and studied in Europe for a year with funding from the EU and from UK student finance. However, I couldn’t have survived there without earnings from my job as an English teacher. Many foreign students studying here do not have the kind of financial help I was lucky to have, and rely entirely on finding work here to buy food and pay rent.
I do not understand how you think anyone could get by in this country without any sort of income from work, or any other form of financial help, unless the students themselves have millionaires for parents. It is not fair to saddle these students with debt, or force their parents to give up huge sums in tuition, accommodation and living costs. Foreign students should be allowed to work in this country, otherwise, I promise you, our universities will suffer, and our economy will suffer too.
Kindly rethink your policies, before you irreversibly destroy the global landscape of our universities and workforce.
Yours,
A pissed off British Postgraduate Student.
