Dr Diana Beech, Chief Executive Officer, London Higher said:
“The ‘rapid review’ of the Graduate Route undertaken by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has today underscored the returns that international students bring to the UK higher education sector and the economy more broadly.
Despite being conducted under less-than-ideal conditions, the MAC report shows the Graduate Route is largely working as intended and the measures introduced in January, to raise visa costs and ban dependents from one-year post-graduate courses, are already succeeding at reducing legal migration. Universities up and down the country are also working hard to eliminate exploitative practices through the UK Agent Quality Framework and should be given time to consult the Home Office on the mandatory registration system for international recruitment agents and subagents so that we can work together to root out those seeking to make enormous profits from the schemes.
Now is not the time to play politics with one of the country’s greatest export industries and national assets. Changing the Graduate Route won’t get us any closer to meeting the pledge to ‘stop the boats’. All it will do is ‘stop the hopes’ of domestic students, employers and local economies as international students take their skills, talents and cash elsewhere.”
