UK universities should utilise Tier 4 visas to help Ukrainian refugees, says Martin McQuillan
As the exodus of refugees fleeing the war zone in Ukraine now exceeds two million people, the number of visas issued for Ukrainians to travel to Britain has, as of 8 March, reached 300. Presumably once the Ukrainian refugees currently in Calais make it to the UK pop-up visa office 70 miles away in Lille, this number will increase.
Meanwhile, a humanitarian corridor has allowed for the evacuation of citizens from the Ukrainian town of Sumy—it is to be hoped that this includes the 1,700 international students at the state university who have been trapped by the fighting.
The UK Home Office is currently doing some ‘world-class’ looking into the problem, to try to understand why its own barriers to entry to the UK are preventing people from entering the UK. The UK’s Ukrainian Humanitarian Route visa continues to prove as rare as the tears of a cat, as they say in the Russian-speaking world.
It has been confirmed that Ukrainian students already studying in the UK “will have their visas temporarily extended or be able to switch to different visa routes”. But what of the students fleeing the conflict in Ukraine?
While the Home Office drags its feet, British universities have at their disposal a secret weapon—the Tier 4 general student visa, which it is in their gift, as highly trusted sponsors, to distribute. Could student visas be used to accelerate the entry of some to the UK?
There were over 1.5 million students recorded in Ukrainian higher education in 2016-17. Few of them will be returning to classes any time soon.
By no means will all of them have left Ukraine, and the international effort must be directed towards the reconstruction of in-country higher education provision as soon as the war is over. However, there will be many who will have had their studies interrupted and are now refugees displaced across Europe.
Coordinated effort
If UK universities wanted to make a difference, a coordinated effort could be made to offer places to displaced students on British degree courses via the Tier 4 student visa route. The fee of £348 for application could be paid by institutions—who knows, with a bit of will from the Home Office and the Department for Education, modest funds from central government might be made available to accelerate the entrance of refugee students.
It is not possible to drop traumatised students into classes mid-semester, but it is possible to prepare for a coordinated effort to offer places to students for a September start. Although universities can act as a sponsor to students fleeing war now, the combined effort might even be a job for some kind of higher education taskforce.
If each of the UK’s 164 universities were to provide places for 100 students displaced by the war, 16,400 young Ukrainian people could enter the country—significantly more than are being accepted through the “humanitarian route”. Admissions are still the preserve of our autonomous universities, and it is also within their gift to waive fees for those students.
Some universities are bigger than others and may be willing to take more Ukrainian scholars. Distributing 100 refugee students among the 40,000 cohort of a University College London or a University of Manchester would hardly be noticed.
Smaller providers may find it more difficult, but a sliding scale of visas relative to the size of universities is not beyond the wit of higher education’s finest. Universities could also provide a maintenance allowance for the students, say £10,000, meaning each cohort would cost an institution £1 million a year.
To put that in context, UK universities are collectively sitting on £49 billion of reserves and make a combined annual surplus of £1.7bn. £1m is the value of the international scholarship budget at Loughborough University. Birmingham City University boasts a similarly sized scholarship budget for UK students.
For some universities, £1m is small change; for others, it is a stretch. But the fine print is not the point here—costs can be offset by donations or through government help. A UK ‘universities of refuge’ programme would make a big difference to those fleeing war and would be a low-cost, high-value win for Global Britain—it may even result in economic gain for the country.
It might even be something that Universities UK would like to take a lead on.
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