Mean-spirited and damaging
Cut your nose to spite your face best sums up Home Secretary Teresa May’s decision to restrict the numbers of overseas students entering Britain. It is both mean-spirited and damaging to the national interest, as the senior and much respected Tory politician, David Willetts, pointed out recently in a newspaper article. Higher education is one of the UK’s most challenging and profitable exports. The vast majority of foreign students seeking admission into Britain’s world class universities are from India and China, two of the strongest emerging economies in the global marketplace. The education they seek is paid for, earning these institutions much needed revenues that go some way to ensuring that their plans for the future do not get derailed. Vice Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge universities, for example, are seasonal visitors to Indian cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, in talent-spotting exercises. Scottish universities tread the same path with a similar goal in mind. However, the more enlightened Scottish authorities permit their foreign students to stay back for a couple of years after graduation in order to earn some money to defray the cost of their education. The skills of these students, especially in the sciences and engineering, contribute also to the Scottish economy. Beyond the commercial angle, there is the intellectual enrichment that the best foreign students bring to British academe. It is a win-win situation, surely. US President Barack Obama thinks so, hence his administration has modified visa restrictions for foreign students – most, as in the UK, from India and China - at American universities, enabling them to prolong their stay in the US, with priority given to science and math graduates. The US government went further. If these skilled graduates were able to get long-term employment in the country, they would be eligible for green cards for right of abode and eventual citizenship, if they so desired. US industry had argued long and hard for such measures so that US companies would have no skills shortage and thus retain their global competitiveness. Clearly, their words were given sufficient weight by Congress and the White House which, alas, has not been the case in Whitehall, despite the pleas of British academics and captains of industry.
