Anti-immigration sentiment & varsity financial crisis: Indian students overcome both
Anti-immigration sentiment & varsity financial crisis: Indian students overcome both
Young people aspiring to study abroad are fully aware that migration and education — or rather the financial crisis that has overtaken higher education — are intertwined issues that strongly affect their chances of realizing their dream. Still, they have three strong cards in their hand: merit, persistence and the knowledge that when they find an institution that wants them, that college or university will do everything possible to get them through any and every barricade.
In this two-part article YUNO LEARNING takes a look at both issues.
Part 1: Immigration
Migration Trends in 2023: A Statistical Overview
Immigration is an issue in rich western countries. Migration statistics (2023) for these countries reveals that the number of legal migrants far surpassed pre-covid numbers of 2019. As for illegal migrants – the numbers cited are speculation and coloured by the political orientation of the source. It is an issue that is weaponized by competing political parties. In fact, looking at France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, we see the rise of parties built around the one single goal of opposing immigration, and these parties are growing and winning elections too. The most vehement anti-immigrationists are outraged by illegal entry, and they want to cut back on legal entry too.
They are particularly keen to narrow the gate that lets in students. Foreign students are condemned almost as much as illegal immigrants because they are believed to be “entering the country under false pretenses“, “scamming immigration laws“, “gaining entry in the name of study when all the time their intention is to find work and never return to their home countries.”
Anti-immigration diatribes make it sound like every arriving migrant is a stone on the chest of the receiving nation. Is that true?
Economic Benefits of Immigration: Facts and Figures
In February this year, America’s Congressional Budget Office published an astounding figure.
The labor force in 2033 is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.
Source: https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/E03057758_OBR_EFO-March-2024_Web-AccessibleFinal.pdf
It’s the same story in the UK. A report released by the UK Government’s Office for Budget Responsibility predicted that higher net migration would raise economic growth and tax receipts by £7.5 billion by 2028-29.
Source: https://obr.uk/box/net-migration-forecast-and-its-impact-on-the-economy/
Immigrants pump up a country’s GDP – especially if they are highly educated and productive immigrants … such as Indians and particularly Indian students. If anybody should be squawking about those best and brightest Indians who go abroad as students and never come back, it should be the Government of India.
No matter what nation we are talking about, GDP rises in proportion to immigration … which makes the “block the foreigners” attitude of the rich world irrational. What explains this intense —and illogical — opposition to immigrants?
Is it racism?
Is it xenophobia?
Is it cynical political manipulation of the populist, rabble-rousing, scapegoating variety?
Racism, xenophobia and political manipulation account for some of the uproar but they don’t tell the whole story.
YUNO LEARNING’s quest to understand leads to economics
Britain’s premier analytical weekly, The Economist, published a clear and detailed explanation on April 30, this year.
Reflecting on the US figures, the unnamed writer argues that immigration’s impact extends to inflation, living standards and government budgets. Here, in capsule form, are the five main reasons for the anti-immigration uproar, as set out in that article …
Fear that low-skilled migrants reduce incomes. Recent migrant surges differ from previous ones in that more of the migrants are low-skilled. When a low-skilled migrant arrives and works for a below-average income, per capita GDP falls even if the migrants’ presence boosts every individual’s income.
Low-skilled migrants flow into poorly paid “dirty jobs”, which, in turn pushes local workers up the ladder to better paid, more productive jobs. People most likely to see their wages fall as a result of migration are those most similar to the migrants, which is typically the previous generation of foreign workers.
When per capita GDP falls, the quality of public services is likely to deteriorate.
Abundance of cheap labour discourages companies from making productivity-boosting investments.
Impact on economic growth and government revenue:
High-skilled workers make enormous net fiscal contribution.
Low-skilled workers impact the economy positively AND negatively
Positively: They typically arrive as adults, so do not require government-provided primary/secondary schooling. They prop up public services directly as they find ready employment as health and care workers, as well as in maintenance jobs.
Negatively:Migrants eventually retire. A low-earning migrant who claims a government pension and uses government-provided health care is a fiscal drag. The 75-year fiscal impact of an immigrant with less than a high-school education, at all levels of government and excluding public goods like national defense, is a negative $115,000 in 2012 dollars
If regulations stop infrastructure from expanding to accommodate arrivals, migration risks provoking a backlash. Obvious case: housing in Canada, where regulation controls supply.
The Aspirations and Realities for Indian Students Abroad
Faced with anti-immigration sentiment, do Indians who want to study abroad stand a chance?
Yes, indeed they do. They hold three strong cards:
The very fact that they can realistically aspire to admission in a foreign college or university is because they have come through the highly competitive Indian educational system and already bear the “A Grade” stamp.
Indian students in foreign colleges/universities enjoy superior “brand image”. The generations of Indian students who went before them by and large earned a reputation for being intelligent, serious, hard-working and – very importantly – strongly averse to making trouble. Present applicants stand on the shoulders of those who went before.
If they do remain after attaining a degree, they will join the ranks of those coveted high-performing professionals who contribute to the wealth of their adopted nation.
Part 2: Higher Education in Financial Crisis
Over the past year, the UK, Canada and Australia have introduced measures to narrow the gate for international students. The headlines tell the story…
‘Graduate Route visas under scrutiny’
‘Tighter procedures to validate’ degrees’
‘Quantum of annual financial support raised, stricter norms’
‘Student visa: bar raised for English language proficiency’
‘Legislation passed to cap annual number of student visas’
‘New law prevents education providers from enrolling foreign students only’
‘Colleges must prove they have student housing’
Articles highlighting the precarious financial position of universities in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia have been numerous too. Writers have pointed out that in the absence of adequate state funding, universities are compelled to maximize enrollment of affluent students who pay full tuition fees. A significant proportion of these affluent students are from abroad. Intake of international students is a matter of survival so institutions are doing all they can to resist restrictions.
Financial Woes of Universities in the UK, Canada, and Australia
Writing about UK colleges and universities, The Guardian put the issue sharply:
[Points in capsule form:]
The value of tuition fees for domestic students has been falling in real terms, since they were frozen in 2017. No one – not students, not parents and certainly not politicians – wants to raise tuition fees. While college/university fees have been frozen, cost of living has not. Housing and transport costs are spiraling.
College/university staff salaries lag behind inflation. Last year, academic staff at more than 100 British universities boycotted exam paper marking to press for pay rise and better working conditions.
The institutions cannot pay. Almost half of UK vice-chancellors expect their university to run at a loss in FY 2024-25. They have been making up for the budget shortfall by proactively recruiting students from abroad, who pay higher fees. (At many of Britain’s leading universities, more than half of their fee income comes from international students.) A facet of international recruitment is the foundation course, which is the special target of Conservative hardliners.
Policies of the Conservative-led government have sharply reduced international student numbers, leading university administrators to warn that a quarter of all academic roles could be cut as a result of the budget crunch. Departments of arts, humanities and social sciences departments will be hardest hit, but shutting them down will have a knock-on effect on money-guzzling science and technology departments.
The higher education sector supports more than 750,000 jobs and contributes £130 billion to the UK economy. If the UK is a body, then “blood-loss” will be severe if this sector goes under the knife.
This description can be applied to universities in the US, Canada and Australia as well.
The “Why” Behind the Financial Crisis
Articles outlining the “what” of the financial crisis in higher education are common but it is rare to come across one that delves into the “why”. When a crisis is widespread, affecting not only all institutions in a country but institutions in many countries, we know that the problem is in the system itself.
A couple years ago, an American sociologist Beth Mintz wrote one of those rare “why” articles.
Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ajes.12370
Mintz, Beth, Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology: 2021 Jan, Volume 80 Issue 1.
[Points in capsule form:]
There has been a significant change in the way education is conceptualized, organized and funded. These changes reflect the five assumptions of the economic philosophy called neoliberalism:
- The free market is efficient,
- The public sector benefits from deregulation and privatization,
- The economy benefits from tax reduction,
- The state should devote only bare minimum to welfare and reject the idea of public good,
- Individuals must take personal responsibility for their own welfare.
How education is funded depends on how one conceptualizes the nature of education:
Is it a public good, producing an educated population which is beneficial to the whole community?
Is it a private good, an investment made by the individual, yielding a return in the form of future earnings?
The advent of neoliberalism in the 1980’s resulted in defining education as a private good. Consequently …
Higher education is seen as a “financial investment” for students, who are conceptualized as “customers“,
For many years state and national allocations for education (particularly for public colleges and universities) have been falling,
Atrophy of other income sources compels colleges and universities to compete for customers,
Need-based financial aid to students takes the form of loans rather than grants.
Students from affluent families can pay; low and middle-income students are priced out. To gain an edge in the competition for “customers“, colleges and universities invest in all sorts of things. Every successful innovation, however expensive, eventually becomes commonplace because each institution must adopt it in order to keep up with the competition.
Examples of “bait” used to attract affluent students:
High-end infrastructure, financed by long-term borrowing, resulting in large debt and interest payments.
Expanded student services. These may not require large capital outlays, but they need staff. Salary budget breakups typically show outlay for administrative staff far exceeding outlay for instructors.
When competitive advantage in a labor market is seen as the whole purpose of education, then attending the most prestigious school makes sense. Customers pursue prestige as a rational strategy for investment maximization and this means that colleges and universities must battle their way up the rankings.
One way to raise ranking is to improve the institution’s selectivity profile. This is achieved by recruiting high achieving customers. A common — and expensive – tactic to pull in the high achievers is tuition discounting, (aka merit scholarships).
Merit money privileges the wealthy; it has grown at the expense of need-based scholarships and it goes predominately to rich students, with awards tending to increase with income levels. This has led to decreases in the proportion of low income and minority undergraduates in college in general, with public sector schools especially hard hit.
International students have become sought-after. They are not only high achievers, they belong to their country’s top economic strata. They are strongly attracted to prestigious institutions and are willing and able to pay high tuition. Year by year, their importance to colleges and universities has increased with the result that institutions now aggressively market themselves internationally. In some institutions, income from foreign students constitutes as much as 57 per cent of fee income.
The economic philosophy of neoliberalism was supposed to make institutions of higher education more efficient; instead, it made institutions vulnerable to market failure. We speak of “financial crisis” but the reality is impending collapse. This crisis has not developed suddenly or in just a few institutions. Rather, all institutions have been inexorably sinking deeper and deeper into a situation of high cost and falling income.
Conclusion:
Indian students aspiring to study abroad, and the counselors who guide them, are already performing at peak efficiency. One can only say to them, “keep at it”. Many will succeed only after repeated attempts. In a situation where the frustration level is high, one way to keep up spirits, and optimism, is to realise that a rejection may have less to do with the “worth” or “worthlessness” of an individual than with issues emerging from the realms of politics or economics. Whole systems are affected by these issues. Certainly, the system of higher education is caught up in the present double-whammy political and economic storm.
For students, the bright spot is that, while competition for seats at colleges/universities is intense, the admission process is not corrupt or dishonest. “Keep at it” … and you will find an institution that wants you. And when you do, rest assured they are on your side and will do all that they can to get you through any and every barricade.