Thinking of coming to the UK to study?
Don't.
The universities are fine, but the visa system is a nightmare and getting worse. Successive governments have targeted students to score anti-immigrant political points.
This may be incredibly disruptive to your studies. If they cancel your visa in the middle or give you one with a shorter duration than your degree and then decide not to renew it, you will not be refunded for the time or money spent for your studies up to that point.
@celesteh this country is always crying about the NHS being understaffed while simultaneously driving away anyone who'd want to to work or study here
the uk does nothing but manufactor it's own destruction
So I'm fairly impressed by Ireland, but I haven't been following the country's politics closely.
The Tories did this because their core voters are people who own small businesses and suburban houses but who have not been to university - the nation of shop keepers.
Middle class people who have been to university, by contrast, tend* to favour things like human rights and justice. Tories saw universities as places that turned people into Labour voters. But universities are major employers. There are a lot of places in the UK where the local university is really important for the local economy or cultural scene. Most voters would not like a policy of fucking over unis because they do understand that our service economy absolutely depends on them.
So instead Tories fucked up uni funding in several ways. They already depended on foreign students, but Tories made that much more important and them immediately set about demonising students as migrants.
To understand Tory policy, imagine that you don't care if the entire country is giant slag heap as long as you have biggest house on the heap.
And for Starmer, his entire vision is to be much more efficient at slag heap delivery.
* These are wide generalisations and not universally applicable. White middle class people are often insulated from needing an analysis of things happening and so many never learn how. Ideally, this kind of analysis is part of the curriculum at most unis. Tories think it's absent in STEM (which is often fair) and that's part of why STEM programs continue to receive funding.
@celesteh @budududuroiu the way I look at it:
The Tories say they want to reduce migration but what (a faction of them) are really most interested in is eroding the status of migrants to make them easier to exploit. So EU migration gets replaced with very restrictive work visas etc which is not incompatible with an increase in net migration.
Reform actually wants to reduce migration (or more accurately, the number of non white people in the UK) and this appeals to the solid 20% of the population who are very racist.
Labour implements their proposed policies on both fronts.
Or as Sivandan put it:
"What Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after."
@celesteh ok I never looked at it that way, makes more sense when looking at why uni has become so expensive in the UK.
I'm part of the last generation of EU students that managed to get the £9000/year fee from SLC.
Anyways, seeing the revolving door of UK PMs, which more closely resembles a Balkan hybrid democracy than a Western liberal democracy, I'm reminded of Alexei Yurchak's Hypernormalisation, where a system is failing, but no one can imagine an alternative to the status quo.
Adam Curtis has invoked that same idea.
Most people I know are aware that everything is about to fall apart, but nobody knows what to do about it.
Fucking hell. What university? Has your friend tried to get help from the UCU?
I'm so sorry for your friend.
I'm not currently in a role, so I can't raise it, but it would be best if this had some consequences for the uni*. Like, their union could object and other branches could sanction them.
* its entirely possible that this is not the uni's fault but is a home office fuck up. A six month visa validity is shockingly short, so something went wildly wrong somewhere.
It sounds like she was on a post-study visa and they refused to sponsor her work visa.
This system is structurally abusive, but the abuse is coming from the Home Office, not the university. They could certainly have done a better job explaining. In order to get sponsored, they'd have to show that nobody else in the UK could do her job, and also pay a ton of money to the Home Office and to lawyers, and also only can sponsor a small number of people so tend to favour more high profile candidates.
Nobody wants to explain this because they feel bad and don't want to get emotionally invested and she's leaving anyway, so if they just ignore the problem it goes away, right? They're incentivised to act like evil fuckers.
Again, I'm sorry for your friend. This is another reason why the UK is not a great place to study. Also, the post-study rules change every time the home secretary sneezes.
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