Is it safe to send your children to UK universities?

Following Anuj Bidve’s terrible murder in Manchester, it is worth asking if Indian parents should send their children to UK universities.

Random killing is not the only form of hate crime Indian students face in the UK. Physical assaults do happen and almost all Indian students experience verbal racist abuse. But we shouldn’t lose our sense of proportion. There is a greater chance of your child being killed or injured on Indian roads if you buy them a scooter than of being killed in the UK by a racist psycho.

When I joined the London School of Economics in 1963 as an undergraduate, I was bowled over by discussions of world events in the student canteen and found myself buying and reading books on Africa and Latin America. That is something I had never dreamt of doing. There is the thrill (and anxiety) of having to look up original sources, write essays and complete projects on your own. Add to that the pain/pleasure of taking your own decisions about everyday life and there is the making of a rounded personality with developed habits of rigorous, independent thinking.

When Indian parents in the UK ask my advice about where to send their teenager for higher education, my first recommendation is: a university away from home and the smothering blanket of the Indian family. It has its own risks. If you send your child away, be prepared for cultural ‘pollution’. It happens only to a tiny minority, but it could happen to your child. My own parents had to cope with it. Brought up in a Jain household where going out to eat potatoes was my teenage act of rebellion, within a year of arriving in London I was eating meat and drinking alcohol for recreation, and still do.

Worse, I was not prepared to lie about it. And horror of horrors, I married a foreigner, twice! My family was mortified and tried to stop me. Eventually they accepted all this as collateral damage and were proud of what they thought were their son’s achievements. However, a sense of proportion is also important in this respect. My sister, a consultant cytologist in Manchester, and I may not have remained good Jains, but did look after our mother for over a decade after our father’s demise.

Any parent refusing to send their child abroad for education because s/he might lose ‘Indian values’ is depriving the child of his/her best chances. Moreover, violent crimes against overseas students are taken seriously by the state in the UK as witnessed by the £50,000 reward offered by the police for information. If I were being cynical I would say such an incentive may have to do with overseas students being crucial for the survival of the higher education institutions here. According to the UK Council for International Student Affairs, in 2009-10, non-UK students made up 68% of full-time postgraduates and 49% of full-time research students.

Some MSc courses at the LSE, my alma mater and employer, have 90% non-UK students and its famous department of economics has not had a home student doing a PhD for over a decade! Moreover, only one third of the non-UK students are from the European Union countries. The rest pay up to £10,000 more per year in fees compared with a home or EU student. No wonder then that for decades all admission tutors have been told to put a cap on home-EU student numbers and fill a much larger minimum quota for high-fee paying overseas students. As India, the second largest sender after China, accounted for 38,500 overseas students out of a total of 240,000 in the same period, it is easy to see why the state is keen not to let hate crimes against Indian students become a big issue in the same way it did in Australia.

There is a category of Indian ‘student’ who should think twice before coming to the UK. This is the economic migrant who spends a lot of borrowed money to get a student visa in the hope of getting a good job and making enough money to alter family fortunes. I have seen too many cases of such people living in hovels. A lot of middlemen benefit. There are the agents who overcharge for visa applications and non-existent contacts for employment; colleges that require fees paid upfront and make no attempt to track absentee students; business people (mainly Asian) who pay below the minimum wage, and landlords who put ‘students’ in shared beds and charge full rents. Parents and potential ‘students’ in this category should think hard before applying for a ‘student’ visa. The rest have very little to fear.

The writer is professor emeritus, London School of Economics g.appa@lse.ac.uk