Table of Contents
What has happened?
- The UK has been accused of snobbery over a new post-Brexit scheme to attract highly-skilled graduates, From the most prestigious overseas universities to work in Britain as it excludes all universities in India.
- Not one IIT made it to the lists of “top 50” international universities whose graduates may apply for the “High Potential Individual (HPI)” visa launched in Britain on Monday.
About the scheme
- The HPI route is an uncapped two-year UK work visa (three years for those with a PhD) for early career stage graduates.
- Graduates must have graduated from an eligible international university in the five years immediately before their application.
- To be eligible, an institution must have featured in the top 50 of at least two of the three ranking lists, Produced annually by QS, Times Higher Education and the Academic Ranking of World Universities.
The problem
- Though the scheme is open to anyone regardless of nationality, the lists of eligible universities exclude all universities in Africa, Latin America and South Asia.
- This means everyone from Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Amitav Ghosh would have been turned down if they had applied to this scheme after their bachelor’s degrees.
- The beguiling idea of a meritocracy once again simply obfuscates the hardening of elitist ranking systems.
- The most recent list, for example, consists of universities based mostly in the USA, including Harvard and Yale, With the rest being in China, Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Canada and Singapore.
- An Indian student would have to have been awarded a qualification (be that a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or PhD) from one of these institutions to be eligible to apply.
What UK says?
- “This new visa offer means that the UK can continue to attract the best and brightest from across the globe,” UK chancellor Rishi Sunak said on Monday.
- The visa scheme “puts ability and talent first – not where someone comes from,” home secretary Priti Patel
- Sadly, this is far from the truth. Why else would the best and the brightest, ability and talent, not include graduates from the IITs and IIMs? The University of São Paolo?
- The “high potential individual” policy essentially fast-tracks visa applications for Ivy League graduates who want to work in the UK.
- The British government is not interested in the best and the brightest across the globe, but in those with access to elite, First World education.
Ranking system in Higher education
- Higher education ranking systems have been widely criticized for a range of reasons,
- Including their devaluation of social sciences and humanities subjects, their emphasis on research over teaching, and their strong statistical correlation with institutional wealth.
- For example, because higher education rankings tend to emphasise research over teaching, academics at richer universities, who have lower teaching loads, are likely to push their universities up the table because they have more time to publish articles and books.
- University league tables have caused palpable damage to institutions of higher education, and therefore to education itself.
- They have created metrics of educational excellence based on financial resources, and governments have responded by ploughing money into leading research institutions.
- A handful of universities receive disproportionate levels of funding in the hope that this will catapult them up the ranks.
- Now the British government has stepped in with an immigration incentive to add to the mix.
Faces backlash
- Indian National Students Association UK president Amit Tiwari said:
- “In the present day, India supplies the most foreign students to UK universities, so the fact that they are not part of this programme defies logic.
- Professors and R&D units value graduates from IIT or IIM.
- UK authorities need to stop treating Indian students like cash cows.”
conclusion
- One should question why rankings are being used as the basis for admitting “high potential individuals” into the UK when they are so clearly biased towards the First World elite.
Q) Which of the college in India was set up by Lord Wellesley for the training of the civil servants of the company in vernacular languages?
- East Indian College
- Punjab National College
- Fort William College
- Sanskrit College
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