Akhila Jayaram and Ben Cope: The mess of student visa schemes is a Conservative made mess – we should clear it up

Akhila Jayaram and Ben Cope are political commentators, and Akhila is a campaigner with Conservative Young Women. 

Choose Britain.

Choose a masters at Coventry University’s London campus.

Choose a minimum wage, low skilled job and some cash-in-hand on the side.

Choose sending money back home.

Choose switching to social care after two years and earning a cool £23,200.

Choose permanent residency five years later.

Choose benefits.

Despite years of talking tough on immigration, the Conservatives legalised this graduate visa immigration route which allowed 758,855 international students to enter the UK in 2022/23. This huge influx drove net migration to 745,000 in the same period. The Migration Advisory Committee’s conclusion that “the Graduate route has broadly achieved, and continues to achieve, the objectives set by this government” is laughable. Boris Johnson’s graduate visa has been uncontrolled and largely unskilled.

The Conservatives have left a mess for Labour to clean up.

Universities are squealing that cuts will hit their bottom line. After treacherous encouragement from the Department for Education, the CEO of Universities UK, the sector lobby group, told the FT this week that it would be “madness” to cut back the route while universities were under financial strain. Yet reassuringly, the government has indicated that they’ll look at grad visas in an upcoming white paper, indicating that visa holders would need to secure a ‘graduate-level’ job, thought to be £30,960 two years after graduating. Kemi Badenoch has gone further, putting the figure at £38,700. But to really solve the problem and take back control, we need to get more creative.

Our proposal is to limit the graduate visa to six months, with a further extension of six months for STEM courses. This creates a balance between giving students sufficient time to gain short term work experience through internships before transitioning into relevant skilled jobs. For researchers and entrepreneurs who bring incredible value to the UK economy, there are already established alternative routes such as the Global Talent visa and the Innovator Founder visa. We won’t lose out on the changemakers this country needs.

Shortening the duration of the grad visa will reduce student migration. When the average wage for a grad visa holder is just £19,200 after 15 months, are we really getting the ‘best and the brightest’? This visa should not be a pathway for postgraduate degree holders to get minimum wage jobs. In 2012, Theresa May completely scrapped the route. As a result, non-EU student numbers fell to 200,000 per year between 2012-17. International students choose the UK for various reasons, but clearly the graduate visa is a pull.

The grad visa should also not be seen as a backdoor to transition into low salary work. 20 per cent of grad visa holders switched to care work visas between 2021-23, from which they can gain permanent residency after 5 years. This type of switching should be banned. Such a ban would not affect genuine students, who would be more concerned with securing a job that they have been studying for.

Most importantly, the government should ban low value courses and universities from accepting international students on student visas by creating an accreditation scheme run by the Office for Students or The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. Only courses delivering real value to students through good employability prospects in the sectors we need will be included. Wrexham University will be off the list, as will Exeter University’s infamous ‘Magic and Occult Sciences’ masters. Such an approach will allow us to be selective right from the beginning, rather than once international students have already arrived.

Those like Priti Patel who continue to defend the last government’s record on immigration are kidding themselves. On the Sun’s Never Mind the Ballots podcast in January, the former Home Secretary pointed to the hockey stick shaped net migration graph and claimed that the “brightest and the best coming to our country.” Yet 66 per cent of grad visas are being issued to non-Russell Group university students, with 30 per cent of the total not attending a university in the top 800 globally, compared to just 10 per cent in the top 200. Is that the brightest and the best?

Jog on.

Then there are the professors who claim that universities will go bust without international student fees. But should low ranking universities providing a poor service be kept afloat by being mandated to essentially sell visas through the form of short masters courses?

It’s duplicitous to the public, who are being told that this is a high-skilled immigration route when it’s often anything but, and it’s a poor use of assets in the UK. Those professors could spend their time better than teaching at the London outpost of former polytechnics!

Lastly, there is the argument that Britain needs more workers to support its rapidly ageing population, and the grad visa is a way of getting them. There is an element of truth to this. Few in Westminster have woken up to the reality of our cratering fertility rate – now 1.44 – which will halve our population by 2100 without immigration. That means fewer workers paying for more pensions and healthcare. But importing legions of low-wage immigrants won’t solve the Treasury’s headaches. The grad visa neo-open border strategy just adds to the chaos.

We need immigration, but we need to be selective.

Ultimately, this is about taking back control. To do this, we need to get creative about reforming the grad visa going forwards, but it also needs to rectify the mistakes the Conservatives made. The ‘Boris-wave’ of graduate immigrants will start gaining permanent residency from January 2027. This could be millions of people.

Students who arrive today will need to earn at least £38,700 to gain permanent residency. There’s no reason why the Boris-wave should only need £29,000, as is currently the case, or as low as £23,200 for certain jobs.

As for those who’ve already switched to a social care visa, the government should consider a longer path to permanent residency.