Why Students from India Should Avoid UK Universities
Most foreign graduates of UK universities may not get work visas even as the universities enroll more foreigners to fund their budget deficits
(Images: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
August 30, 2025
By Ignatius Chithelen*
The Reform Party will deport all 600,000 illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom, if it wins the 2029 parliamentary elections, the party’s leader Nigel Farage said this week. For months, the party and other far right groups have been organizing protests against immigrants, especially those seeking asylum. Farage’s party, which currently has just four of the 650 parliamentary members elected to the House of Commons, is leading in national opinion polls, the BBC reported.
Apparently, rising anti-immigrant sentiment among the British, amidst high unemployment and economic stagnation, is pushing the ruling Labor Party Government to adopt stricter immigration policies. One of them, to be implemented later this year or in January 2026, will severely restrict the chances of foreign graduates of UK universities finding work in the country: temporary work visas require employer sponsorship; jobs must meet higher salary thresholds; employers will find it difficult to hire foreigners, or as the BBC reported, employers will be “encouraged to find and develop domestic talent”; work visas will be valid for a maximum eighteen months; and foreigners will qualify for permanent work visas only after ten years, up from five years.
The new policy will hurt students from India, who are the largest group of foreigners at UK universities. In 2023-2024, they accounted for 15% of the 732,000 foreign students. That year, the 107,500 students from India was nearly nine times the number enrolled in 2017-2018.
This sharp rise in students from India was mainly due to the new work visa policy introduced in 2021. It made it easier for foreign graduates to get work visas in the UK than in the US. The UK government’s plan was to attract foreigners, especially Indians, to pursue advanced studies in the UK rather than in the US. Also, in the US, Indian nationals faced new restrictions on work visas, imposed by the first Donald Trump administration, 2016-2020.
In turn, British universities are very eager to raise more fee revenues from foreign students to fund their budget deficits. Typically, universities try to hide such financial motives by using phrases like “spending to improve technology and services” and “enhance the student experience.”
In contrast, UK government documents bluntly point out the financial motive. For instance, a research briefing from the UK Parliament library states, “Reductions to teaching grants, the freezing of (domestic) tuition fee caps, rising costs have meant many higher education providers (in the UK) have looked to the tuition fees of international students to cross-subsidise shortfalls elsewhere in budgets.”
In fact, in 2019, the UK government, under then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, set a financial goal to be attained by 2030: universities and other higher education institutions should bring in £35 billion per year in fees from foreign students. Known as the International Education Strategy: global potential, global growth, it had a related target to increase the number of foreign students to 600,000 per year.
“The latter ambition was met for the first time in 2020/21, with 605,130 international higher education students studying in the UK,” notes the parliament library briefing. In addition to enrolling more foreigners, the universities can keep raising their fees. “International fees are not capped in the same way as the fees of ‘home’ students, and so providers can charge significantly more,” states the UK parliament library briefing.
The rising dependance of UK universities on fees from foreign students is plainly evident. In fiscal year 2023-2024, the fee income of UK higher education institutions from foreign students was £12.1 billion. This accounted for a quarter of their total funding, up from around 5% in the mid-1990s.
The parliament library briefing notes that the economic consultancy London Economics estimates that international students, starting in fiscal year 2021-2022, would bring economic benefits to the UK of £42 billion. They cost the UK £4.4 billion, so their net economic benefit is £37.5 billion. The consultancy states that “the economic impact was spread across the entire UK, with international students making a £58 million net economic contribution to the UK economy per parliamentary constituency…This is equivalent to £560 per member of the resident population.”
While British universities and citizens benefit from the money spent by foreign students, most Indian nationals take on a major financial burden to pay for the tuition fees, boarding and other costs of studying in the UK. They borrow £35,000 or more from Indian banks, for a one-year Masters’ degree, by pledging their family homes as collateral. The annual interest rates on the loan are 8% or higher.
Students from India should be aware that, like universities in the US, UK universities, including the top-ranked ones, seek to generate revenues by offering Master’s degrees in dozens of programs. Most such degrees do not improve a student’s job prospects. Also, universities vastly expand the class size of business, science, technology, engineering, and math programs, popular with foreign students, ignoring the fact that it leads to more graduates competing for jobs.
Initially, under the 2021 work visa policy, foreigners with Masters and PhDs from British universities automatically qualified for two-year and three-year UK work visas respectively, even if they had no job offers. As a result, in fiscal year ended March 2023, 162, 655 Indian nationals secured work visas. There is no official or other data on how many of them found jobs.
Anecdotal evidence suggests most of them could not find work. “90% of my batch (of fellow Indian graduates) had to go back because there are no jobs, unless you have money to throw, don’t consider” studying in the UK, Janhavi Jain posted on X/Twitter in May this year. According to her LinkedIn profile, Jain earned an MSc in Marketing from the University of Warwick, UK. A marketing consultant in London, she earned a Bachelor’s of Commerce from Gargi College, Delhi University.
There are several similar posts, though anonymous, on Reddit and other social media platforms. One of them states, the one-year MSc in the UK “typically offers less return on investment compared” to an MTech, ME, or MS in India. “99% of my friends have returned to India after completing their MSc” in the UK. “Please take my experience seriously. You might want to reconsider” studying in the UK.
In 2024, the UK modified its work visa policy to include requiring a job offer, and that too one paying more than £38,700 per year. Not surprising then, that in the year ended March 2025, only 31,000 work visas were issued to Indian nationals, mainly in the healthcare, home care and technology fields; this was less than a fifth of the visas issued in fiscal year 2023.
Students in India should not view an advanced degree from the UK, or the US, as the easy option to finding work in India. They should follow the path pursued by many top graduates of the world-renowned Indian Institutes of Technology. The IIT graduates take up jobs at Google, Procter & Gamble, and other global companies in India. Some get transferred by their companies to higher paying positions including in Singapore, the Middle East, and the U.S. This path allows Indian professionals, who work in India, to earn an income while avoiding taking on large debts to pursue advanced degrees in the UK or the US.
There are an estimated 100,000 students from India enrolled at British universities in the current 2025-2026 academic year. Due to the new work visa policy, very few of them are likely to find jobs in the UK upon graduation. Sadly, if they cannot find work in the UK, and thus repay their education loans, they risk losing the family home in India to the bank.
In a recent post on Reddit, an Indian regrets his decision to earn a Masters’ degree in the UK. He writes that a significant part of his salary in India goes to repaying the loan he borrowed to pay for his UK degree. Yet, “even after 5 years” of repayments, the balance on his loan is still quite large.