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Proposed Student Visa Changes in Britain Will Damage Universities, Report Warns

February 18, 2011, 3:50 pm

The British government’s proposed restrictions on student visas to reduce the number of immigrants to the country “amount to a hostile act against Britain’s universities,” a new report charges. The report by Edward Acton, the vice chancellor of the University of East Anglia, for the Higher Education Policy Institute, an independent think tank, is a response to the government’s plans to reform the student-visa system through measures that include reducing the number of students studying for below degree-level courses, raising language requirements, and restricting the ability of foreign students to work and bring family members with them. The government’s plans are based on flawed statistics and assumptions about student migrants, the report says, and risk inflicting severe economic damage on the country’s higher-education sector.

Foreign students, who pay a higher tuition rate than students from Britain and other European Union countries, are an increasingly important source of revenue for many British universities. Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the think tank, said in a statement that, if implemented, the measures “will seriously weaken the finances of our universities at a time when they are facing serious pressure because of public expenditure cuts.”

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  • http://whytheology.wordpress.com/ Trey Medley

    What possible reason is there to focus on students? Students don’t make large sums of money that they then secretly send back to their home countries. Instead, they usually either go into significant debt, rely largely upon foreign based money, and/or deplete previous savings from foreign income. There seems to be a general distrust of “immigrants” from the UK government that is largely (though admittedly not entirely) without warrant. Those who abuse the system will, by and large, find new ways to do so. Those who would be otherwise compliant will determine that it is simply not worth the trouble and enter Higher Education elsewhere, harming both UK institutions of Higher Education and the general economy of Britain overall. If the UK continues this trend, they will isolate and insulate themselves so much that they will find they will have become irrelevant to the global economy, and will be surpassed by other, more immigration friendly, societies.

  • http://www.facebook.com/quincy.lehr Quincy R. Lehr

    “I used to follow a great many journals in my field, which is modern and contemporary poetry. Today I read far fewer. Most publications now seem more or less interchangeable—the poetry mostly forgettable and the critical prose generic. Perhaps I’m getting old and tired, but I’ve noticed that most of my peers also seem to follow these publications with less interest. Perhaps we are in a poetry slump.” Or perhaps he is so out of touch he hasn’t noticed the proliferation of newer journals in his own ostensible stomping grounds. Measure is hands-down a far better magazine than its predecessor The Formalist. New Walk is new but robust and omnivorous. I’m partial to the Raintown as its accociate editor, of course. There has been a veritable explosion of good, varied ezines. It is, in fact, quite far from a slump, regardless of what that “pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?” dip$#!t thinks. From my vantage point, it’s a hell of a lot more vigorous in this patch than it was when I started out nine years ago.

    If Gioia is too tired, too stodgy, and too set in his ways to look even somewhat more closely at what’s going on in his own vicinity, perhaps he should back off of his role as impresario/tastemaker and make way for those with the requisite stamina and openness, and he’ll be able as a consequence to focus on his treadmill/CNBC sessions without guilt. It is hardly uncommon to gripe about how things aren’t like the “good old days” when one was at least a marginally young poet, but it’s a sentiment of which one should be at least a bit sheepish.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001847433711 Ed Shacklee

    It’s not poetry that’s likely to grow stale — it’s us.  Every generation produces reams of bad poetry.  That doesn’t change.  What changes over time is our own stamina, making us less inclined to wade through bad poems to get to the very good ones that each generation also produces.  

    To say that contemporary poetry is “mostly forgettable” is to ignore that in every age there are young turks who declare that the past is worthless, and old farts who say the same thing about the present; and it ignores how young turks can become old farts in the blink of an eye.  A poet as astute as Mr. Gioia shouldn’t fall into that trap.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1050352806 Brianne Keith

    Isn’t reading two novels a week a bit much? Doesn’t seem like engaged reading, the type of reading where one book spurs the curiosity to the next. 

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