On 23 May 2023, then home secretary Suella Braverman announced a package of measures to damp down the higher education sector’s contribution to net migration. The removal of the right for taught postgraduates to bring dependants dominated the headlines, and has loomed large over arguments about international recruitment ever since.
One of the other changes that attracted less publicity – indeed, it was welcomed by the sector – was the elimination of international students’ ability to switch out of the student route onto a work visa before their studies have been completed (with the exception of PhD students, who would still be allowed to after 24 months, in recognition of the fact they may be employed by their university).
This new policy was brought into effect by a statement of changes to the immigration rules on 17 July 2023. As set out by paragraphs 6.5 and 6.6 of the explanatory memorandum, the ban on “switching” came into effect at 3pm that same day, counter to usual practice of leaving at least 21 days before immigration rule changes apply. “The Government considers this departure from that convention to be necessary and proportionate,” it is noted, in order to “reduce the possibility of a large number of applications for […] switching being made in the 21 days usually available between Immigration Rules changes being laid and coming into force.”
A petition opposing the change was launched, eventually gaining 15,579 signatures:
We want Government to postpone the rule implemented on 17 July 2023 which prevents existing students from moving to a Skilled Worker without completing studies. We believe this rule should only be implemented on new students starting in January 2024.
We believe this change is unfair and unjustified as when students came the rules allowed them to switch onto the Skilled Worker visa route without completing studies and existing students should not be prevented from switching in this way. The rule should be implemented to new students starting from January 2024.
There should be no retrospective effect on law, it should be implemented on new students coming from January 2024 onwards.
The Home Office was unmoved, saying in its response that “the student visa is for study” and that “we needed to crack down on broader abuse of the system and prevent people using the Student route as a backdoor to looking for work.”
On the charge that this was a “retrospective” application of the law, the response said:
When someone is switching immigration routes, the rules that apply are those in place at the time they switch, not the rules in place when they first entered the UK under a different route entirely.
One student affected by the change was Ashraful Islam, from Bangladesh, who had come to the UK on a student visa in January 2023. On 20 July of that year – three days after the statement of changes – he applied to switch to a five-year skilled worker visa, with a plan to work in the care sector. He had a certificate of sponsorship from an employer dated 16 June.
His application was rejected by the Home Office – and he applied for a judicial review. This was refused in both January and April 2024, so he went to the Court of Appeal. The case was rejected for a final time in April of this year.
His case rested on a line in the new rules which said:
An application which does not meet all the validity requirements for a Skilled Worker may be rejected as invalid and not considered.
The argument was that the presence of may within the rules (“may be rejected”) left discretion to the Secretary of State to make a decision. He also pointed out that his certificate of sponsorship had been issued before the rule change, the rapid implementation of the new rule departed from convention, the application was made very shortly after the change came into force, he had not been aware of the change’s effect, and that he met all other criteria. Given these facts, were the Home Office empowered to exercise discretion there were a variety of reasons why it should choose to do so.
The judges agreed that this was not a correct interpretation of what the word may was doing in this context – rather, the “natural and ordinary meaning” was that the Home Office is entitled to reject a non-compliant application “without any consideration whatever of the underlying merits of the application.”
The court did however rule that the Home Office was not able to claim its legal costs from the appellant, as it had failed to submit an argument to the court until 17 March, two weeks before the hearing, despite permission to appeal having been granted in July 2024.
Nobody cares
The final tossing out of Ashraful Islam’s persistent attempts to get redress through the courts is probably the last glimmer of attention to a piece of immigration policy that nobody really cared about.
You would get long odds on switching from student to work visas ever being allowed again in any future migration rules. In the run-up, Universities UK International spoke for most of the higher education sector when it said:
We would welcome the proposals to end switching from student and work visas where students have not completed their course. This would close an unhelpful loophole and ensure that international students that choose the UK finish their programmes before they are able to move into full-time employment.
Universities’ work was greatly complicated by international students who had seemingly applied solely in order to get to the UK and then immediately look for employment. There are a whole host of incentives to seek to prevent this from happening, from tuition fees being paid in instalments to UKVI compliance metrics penalising institutions with lower completion rates. And it somehow goes further than this, striking at a sense of what university study is for.
It’s hardly good for students either, who are paying enormous amounts of upfront tuition fees, visa charges, and in many cases commission to recruitment agents, relative to the worth of the education they receive during a shortened time as a student in the UK.
But you couldn’t quite imagine a world in which home students were legally prevented from dropping out of university and going into employment (though admittedly a regulatory focus on continuation along with a completely inflexible student finance system put plenty of pressure in the system to prevent this from happening). The government’s whole framing of international students in recent years has become dominated by a tension over whether or not they are supposed to be finding employment. Like this, not like that. And equally in the higher education sector, the change in tenor around an institution’s relationship with its international students that the reintroduction of post-study work permissions engendered has still not really played out in full.
The corresponding rise in importance of international recruitment agents and sub-agents is a big part of this. The Financial Times’ splash last weekend on how students are being “lured” to the UK was a welcome bit of attention to the issue. One student had been told that they would be eligible for indefinite leave to remain after five years on the student and graduate route – neither qualifies. Another felt she had been misled over the availability and remuneration of part-time work. We’ve covered stories of much worse practice on Wonkhe in the past.
Recruitment agents (and a wider ecosystem of peers, advisors and influencers) are undoubtedly encouraging and facilitating young people in other countries who would like to work in the UK to find ways to take advantage of student visas. One commentator is quoted over on University World News this week in pretty stark terms:
One agent once told me that the student visa route, despite upfront tuition payments, was ‘cheaper and less risky than paying a people smuggler’.
The Home Office’s approach to policymaking has become a whack-a-mole for these instances of unintended consequences – with the result that the majority who would actually like a fulfilling university experience followed by a successful professional life, whether in the UK or elsewhere, are constantly having their experiences made more tawdry and more unfair. And this is to say nothing of the fact that constantly changing how the visa system works creates a perfect state of flux, confusion and misinformation for unscrupulous actors to take advantage of.
If it was just about switching, that would be one thing. But the changes to the post-study work landscape have proliferated in the last three years – and despite what the government may protest, it is one retrospective change after another if you are an international student.
Now wait for last year
From 6 February 2024 the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) main rate rose from £624 to £1,035 a year, a 66 per cent increase. This had at least been announced in July 2023 – with the rationale of funding an NHS pay rise – along with an increase to visa fees. The cost of a graduate visa, for example, rose by 15 per cent to £822.
In neither case did we see quite the level of haste from the Home Office that had been the case with banning switching. But there is still a clear “retrospective” element to it, given that many students moving onto post-study work would have already signed up for their student visa before the changes had been made – in some cases, long before. It doesn’t really make any odds whether those on student visas are given a handful of hours, or 21 days, or several months – they are a captive audience.
The increase in visa fees and health surcharge also applied to the skilled worker route (with the exception of certain healthcare occupations for the IHS) – again, those moving from study or graduate visas into work visas were charged far in excess of what they could have expected would be the case. For those with dependants, yet more. The IHS is an annual charge, but all years are payable in advance.
If we consider an international student’s time at university and subsequent entry into the labour market as one “product”, then this would be a clear example of drip-pricing – showing the purchaser an initial price and then including additional, unavoidable charges later in the purchase process. Elsewhere on Wonkhe, Jim has written regularly about how universities themselves are required to avoid this in their marketing and contractual arrangements with students, especially under more stringent CMA guidance which is in effect as of this year.
The counter-argument would then be that study and work are two separate things – going back to the Home Office response to the switching petition, it’s a “different route entirely” – as well as the fact that the government is not selling a product, it’s operating the country’s border system. But as the international education strategy and many other policy papers spell out, post-study work arrangements are designed to attract students to study in the UK, despite all the subsequent handwringing. They are part of the package. The Home Office might be safe from judicial review here, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.
The changes last year went far beyond price-gouging. From April the baseline minimum salary for skilled worker visas was increased from £26,200 to £38,700, and the minimum salary specific to particular jobs (the “going rate”) was also substantially increased. Student and graduate visa holders benefit from a discount rate here, but this was still a massive inflation-busting restriction on the jobs that students would be able to get sponsorship for. For many, this was a large part of the reason to come to the UK to study – to progress from university into a career, in the same way that it is for domestic students. For plenty, this was essentially the only reason they had chosen the UK higher education system over international rivals – let’s be honest.
Again, for international students already at university in the UK, and a large swathe of graduate visa holders, the changes were implemented far too quickly for there to be any possibility of them getting onto skilled work routes before the cut-off (let’s remember, “switching” is banned, and morally suspect). James Cleverly’s statement to Parliament in December was clear this was not retrospectively unfair on those already here:
Those already in the Skilled work route, and applications made before the rules change, will not be subject to the new £38,700 salary threshold when they change employment, extend, or settle.
So that’s alright then. Unless you are a student, or a graduate route visa holder not yet in a position to find permanent long-term employment.
The raised salary threshold was well in excess of the average salary for typical graduate roles in many parts of the UK. It’s unsurprising that both the Scottish and Welsh governments have been hammering the point that two years of graduate route (unsponsored) work is unlikely to allow young people to progress to a point in their careers where they are being paid enough to qualify for the skilled worker visa, given average wages in both nations. The same is true in many parts of England. If you wanted to design a policy to encourage graduates to head to London (and, longer-term, to start their educational journeys at random newly-opened branch campuses in the capital), it would probably look a lot like this.
So now international students will be paying much more in immigration charges than they could have realistically expected upon coming to the UK to study. And the kinds of work available to them for longer-term settlement have completely changed, as has its geography. Could it get any worse?
There’s no way this white paper’s CMA compliant
The latest round of proposed changes to migration policy, as heralded in last Monday’s white paper, represent a new low in terms of changing the rules of the game while it’s already in motion.
We don’t yet know when the reduction in length of the graduate route will come into effect (for UG and PGT) – next January feels most likely if you had to guess. The detail remains to be seen, but it feels wholly plausible that many students currently studying on courses which finish after this date will see themselves with a smaller post-study work entitlement than they expected when they signed up.
But as much as this change and the prospect of a fee levy may have caught the sector’s attention – for their as-yet-unknown impact on recruitment and institutional finances – there are much more flagrant examples of rug-pulling in what the government’s proposing.
Really it’s a cumulative effect. Labour’s overall plan to link up skills and migration is premised on a lot of additional charges and eligibility changes for work visas. For example, the Immigration Skills Charge which employers must pay when sponsoring a skilled worker visa is being hiked by 32 per cent to more than £1,300 a year (for medium and large employers). This (further) discourages companies from sponsoring anyone on the graduate route – ironically, students going directly to the skilled worker visa on completion of their course are exempt, further calling into question how the graduate route is being conceptualised.
Visa thresholds for skilled work, already massively hiked in 2024, are likely to rise further in many professions that international graduates might have been planning to go into. The planned abolition of the immigration salary list, which provides salary discounts for certain occupations, will see to this – though we don’t know the detail yet. Many occupations will be removed from eligibility altogether. The Migration Advisory Committee has also just said that it would like to further review the “new entrant” discount rate for students (and presumably graduate visa holders):
The impacts of arrangements for new entrants since the 2024 salary threshold increase are uncertain and would be worth reviewing in more detail.
All these policy measures and the question marks hanging over them greatly complicate the ability of current students to plan where they are going – and represent a fundamental break with how the system was working when they signed up to study in the UK.
Worst of all is the change to routes to citizenship and indefinite leave to remain – again, ill-defined and uncertain in its exact implementation for the moment. But the white paper promises that in the future it will take 10 years to qualify for settlement, rather than the current five. For one thing, indefinite leave to remain brings with it eligibility for home tuition fees – groups like Hong Kong Watch are already highlighting how this may mean young people on BN(O) visas needing to wait an extra five years to qualify. In England, at least – the Scottish government has already changed the rules to allow them to qualify after three years’ residency.
And for all the young people from around the world who at some point in the last few years made the decision to plan for a long-term career in the UK? One graduate route visa holder greeted last Monday’s white paper announcements with the following post on social media:
It’s official: UK graduate visas are a £3000 worth scam. To anyone who’s reading this and pondering about where to study out of the European countries: do not repeat my mistakes and waste your time, energy, and money on boosting the UK economy for nothing in return.
£3000 is roughly the graduate visa fee plus two years of the immigration health surcharge. The particular policy change that had spurred the post was the change to long-term residency:
I’m so mad at myself right now! I spent a huge amount of money and time on looking for a sponsored position in this country only to find out that I won’t be able to do it and that if I do land a sponsored role, it won’t mean my whole life isn’t in a precarious situation for 10 YEARS.
They go onto say that they now regret having studied in the UK, and that they will now do their best to warn off other prospective students and graduates (as well as hoping to “magically land an incredibly high-paying job” in the window before further changes come into effect).
And in the middle
Plenty of international students will be confused right now – or furious. Most if not all international applicants will not be sure about exactly what they would be getting into if they came to the UK to study in the next year.
Into the information void inevitably swoops networks of recruiters and advisors, many acting on slices of commission from higher education institutions, to over-promise and distort what post-study work in the UK is like – or at least to act as if they have the answers.
Universities are stuck in the middle. Agents will still be keen to “lure” students to the UK, and in the worst parts of the industry this will continue to involve outright deception. And the government is once again making changes to post-study work that retrospectively affect students, in ways that would have affected their decision-making if they had known. There will be a generation of graduates going back to their home countries with cautionary tales of how international education is not how it was promised to them.
This isn’t to say that the higher education sector is entirely divorced from both these acts of misselling. The behaviour of agents should be within the sector’s gift to improve, and some steps appear to be being taken, though without more transparency it’s hard to know to what extent it’s just talk. As for the Home Office, it would be nice if the impact of changes on current students would feature much more prominently in the sector’s lobbying efforts, as compared to hypothetical applicant numbers.
But practically, the next few years look set to have continued moral challenges for universities around international students, not just financial ones. UKVI might be cracking the whip, but increased scrutiny of international students’ attendance and progress cannot be allowed to become an intrusive refrain echoing through their lives on campus. The graduate route has changed and could change further, and realistically will not be a route into permanent work in the UK for many – so universities need to think how their graduates can actually get something fulfilling out of it, and evaluate whether this is working.
International students and applicants alike will need clear, honest advice about how the visa system works – from the university itself, rather than those with a financial stake in the ensuing decisions – as well as honesty when things are shit and honesty when what’s coming down the line is not clear.
