International students have been in the news again, this time with the media suggesting they’re taking the places of UK students at top universities. So much of what we’ve read over the past few months, and especially the past couple of weeks, has just been xenophobia dressed up as a discussion on UK immigration policy.
We called out the Government back in May for viewing international students as a quick route to meeting lower migration targets when they changed the visa rules to make it harder for students to bring dependents with them. Since then, and with a General Election on the way this year, the debate about international students, net migration, and visas has only become more toxic.
So much so, that last week the Provost felt the need to send an email to all students and staff about the enormous cultural impact international students have both on higher education and UK society. He said the UK is lucky to have its international students and we couldn’t agree more.
Three out of five of us on the Sabbatical Officer team are international students, so naturally, we think globally. UCL is approximately 50% international, and as students we’re outward facing, we see the impact we can make across the world. This global outlook is reflected in the kind of people who choose to come to UCL, both from the UK and overseas. We all share a desire to tackle the challenges facing the world, but it’s through the intercultural engagement woven into the way we experience student life at UCL that gives us a belief that we can do it.
We can’t and won’t take for granted that, for example, a student from Mumbai can work with a student from Manchester to tackle a real-world problem in one of our Volunteering Service’s reading week social hackathons. These things feel uniquely UCL, but this type of intercultural engagement is happening across UK Higher Education. At UCL, it's the difference in life experience and background which makes for a more challenging, interesting, and ultimately rewarding, experience.
We want to double down on our internationalism. Celebrate it. Be proud of it. Embrace our international student community, learn from each other, and grow together. We’ve written about how we’re going to do this in our Student Life strategy under the Intercultural Engagement theme. It starts with creating hundreds more opportunities to gain international experiences and develop their intercultural competencies. Even more events to celebrate our different cultures (like International Festival next week). And giving much more support to our student-led groups who provide ways to learn new languages, try cuisines and in doing so develop their cultural awareness and understanding.
How far does government and media rhetoric have to go before international students feel the UK is no longer a welcoming open-minded place to spend some of the most important years of your life? If that happens, we all lose. Not just UCL, not just Higher Education, but the whole country.
It’s an election year, so there’s an opportunity for political parties to set out their plans for international students in their manifestos. They should start by removing international students and their dependents from the net-migration targets and reverse the decision to change visa eligibility rules for students’ dependants. They could go further and improve the conditions of the student visa by phasing out the NHS Health Surcharge and reducing visa application costs. International students already pay enormous amounts to study here and are net contributors to the UK economy. They could go further still and next month we’re going to share a whole set of policies we think political parties should adopt to make student life, including international student life, better.
In the meantime, if you want to help make life better for all students at UCL, join the Leadership Race and put yourself forward for election. You could be a Sabbatical Officer next year and continue to shape the debate on international students and Higher Education.
Take care,
Issy, Aria, Mary, Shaban and Ahmad