A British immigration agency’s unprecedented decision to rescind the right of a large London university to enroll students from outside the European Union reverberated on Thursday, stoking concerns about whether the move could end up damaging the country’s overall efforts to recruit international students.
The national border authority revoked London Metropolitan University’s status as a “highly trusted sponsor” of international students on Wednesday, a step that threw into limbo the fate of some 2,700 students. While potentially catastrophic for the university itself, which said that the situation had already cost it more than $15-million, the decision could have far-reaching consequences for many other institutions.
“The message that gets out to the world is that students can be recruited in good faith to universities in England and then find themselves prevented from attending that university, with no certainty of attending another,” said Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, an independent research center. “The message, even if only partially true, will be very serious and will be exploited by those competing for a share of the overseas student market.”
Christopher Price, a consultant whose company, PFL Group International, recruits international students, said there is no doubt that the announcement will damage British higher education’s valuable global brand. “London Met was a very successful international recruiter and has basically just had the rug pulled out from under it,” he said. He compared the situation to the decline in international applications that Australian universities experienced after attacks on Indian students in 2009.
“This is our Indian-student-being-mugged-in-Melbourne moment,” he said.
‘Revoked via a Newspaper’
London Metropolitan was informed in mid-July that its status as a highly trusted sponsor had been suspended “until further notice over fears that a small minority of its international students did not have accurate documentation to remain in the UK,” according to a statement on the university’s Web site. As concerns were raised, Mr. Price’s firm got in touch with the handful of students it had helped place at London Metropolitan.
“We started calling students in, letting them know there could be an issue here,” he said, and those students all made alternative arrangements. But most international students at the university had little reason to fear the worse, said Ayoola Onifade, president of the university’s student union. Other institutions had faced similar suspensions, but their trusted-sponsor status was later reinstated, and most people apparently anticipated that London Metropolitan too would be able to resolve the issues that had concerned the border agency. “We were expecting to hear good news,” said Mr. Onifade. “The position of the university was that everything was going to be OK.”
Instead, news leaked over the weekend that the university faced the harshest sanction that the immigration agency could impose. University officials read in The Sunday Times that the institution was likely to lose its status as a highly trusted sponsor. “To learn that we might have our HTS status revoked via a newspaper, with the panic that this can cause for thousands of students, is outrageous,” a statement on the university’s site said.
In an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, the immigration minister, Damian Green, explained that the university had failed to pass muster in three main areas. Audits that the border agency had been conducting since July showed that more than a quarter of the students sampled were in the country illegally; many students lacked the required standards of English, and there was no evidence that the university had tried to ensure that the standards were being met; and many students were simply not turning up for class. Any one of the breaches would have been serious, the minister said, but finding all three at London Metropolitan demonstrated that the institution was “very, very seriously deficient as a sponsor.”
‘Draconian Sanctions’
Even so, the severity of the punishment has taken many by surprise. “The word everybody is using is ‘disproportionate,’” said Dominic Scott, chief executive of the UK Council for International Student Affairs. He said it was difficult to imagine that the university’s “administrative failures” merited such “draconian sanctions.”
The move has also highlighted divisions in the British government between the departments responsible for immigration and for universities. The government’s goal of reducing the number of immigrants has repeatedly clashed with the ambitions of the higher-education sector, which increasingly relies on income from international students, who pay much higher tuition than students from Britain and other European Union countries. To that end, university officials have been pressing the government, without success, to stop counting international students in immigration figures.
“We have a government that is basically hostile to immigration and has a policy of drastically cutting immigration, and in order to do that, the only way they have been able to claim to do so is by cutting students,” said Mr. Bekhradnia.
There is no way to formally appeal the border agency’s decision, so the university’s only hope for redress is to seek some sort of judicial review. In an interview with The Guardian, Malcolm Gillies, the university’s vice chancellor, said that he had begun consulting lawyers, but such a process could take time to wind its way through the courts. That would offer little consolation to students now scrambling to find a new university that will accept them so close to the beginning of a new term, and facing a worst-case scenario of deportation, according to Mr. Scott.
Fears at Other Universities
The immigration department’s rules allow a university to reapply for trusted-sponsor status six months after a suspension, but a legal challenge could also take that long, said Mr. Scott. (There is also the possibility that students could pursue legal action against the university.) The government will soon begin sending letters informing students that their visas will be curtailed in 60 days. Given past experience, Mr. Scott said, this will take some time, and some students might be able to finish their courses if they are due to complete them before Christmas.
The government is working to help “appropriately qualified genuine students to find another institution where they can continue their studies,” according to the border agency’s Web site. Mr. Scott estimated that around a third of the affected students would be able to enroll in other institutions, but with all the administrative and practical headaches, many will just give up and go home. The border agency’s site warns new international students planning to begin their studies at London Metropolitan not to depart for Britain.
In his comments to the BBC, Mr. Green, the minister, emphasized that the sanction against London Metropolitan “will not be replicated across the university sector.” Others echoed that sentiment, but just a day after the announcement, it already appeared that other institutions could also be facing a similar fate.
By Thursday evening, the BBC was reporting that two unnamed universities feared that their license to enroll international students could also be revoked and had sought legal advice.
