The Financial Express (Delhi Edition)
Brexit threatens UK varsity dream for EU students
Rome, July 4: For Fabienne Vicari, Brexit has made the prospect of sending her son to a UK university more remote.
Like thousands of parents in the European Union, the Italian-French mother of three living in Rome is confronting a potential by product of the UK’ s vote to leave the 28- country bloc: the more than doubling of British university fees. After decades during which EU citizens studying at UK universities were charged “home fees,” or the same amount as their British counterparts, the Brexit vote may lump them with international students, whose annual tuition can go higher than 35,000 pounds ($46,000).
“If you get into Cambridge or Oxford it can beanotherwise it’ s not really worth it anymore ,” said Vicari, whose oldest son, Michele, will have to choose a university next year for enrollment in autumn 2017. “You want them to have an international education — I spent a year studying in the UK when I was young — but you have to use common sense too.”
As the UK’ s vote to leave the EU slowly sinks in, citizens of the rest of the bloc are counting the cost of the disengagement. While the free movement of EU citizens, trade, financial transactions and political wrangling shave grabbed world headlines, in some households from Paris and Rome to Berlin and Amsterdam questions are emerging on the impact of the possible exit on issues such as higher education.
There are about 125,000 EU students at British universities, who pay home fees and are eligible for student loans, according to data from the UK Council for International Student Affairs. While EU students currently enrolled have received reassurances from most universities that they will continue to pay home fees of about 9,000 pounds for the academic year that starts in September, there are no guarantees that will continue.
“There’salotof concern— especially around issues like fees going up,” said Agustin Ferrari, 19, a Madrid resident who holds German, Swiss and Argentine nationalities and is studying politics and anthropology at the University of Cambridge. “Even if it won’t necessarily affect those of us who are here now, people worryabout how it might in the future in terms of their ability to do further study or stay in the UK to work.”
Future applicants may be stuck with annual fees of about 23,000 pounds, or more than 35,000 pounds for labbased or medical degrees. They may no longer have access to student loans that, for some, meant tuition coverage with repayment only after obtaining a job — work that was often in the UK where, as EU citizens, they needed no visas. In Scotland, where EU students pay no tuition if they meet some conditions, the shock may be greater. They could face fees of 30,000 pounds a year as international students. They may also graduate in a country with a less certain economic future. “Heightened uncertainty, diminished confidence and lower spendingand investment will weigh on the UK’s economic and financial performance following the majority vote to leave the European Union,” Moody’s Investors Service said in a July 1 report.
“Young Europeans may miss their chance at getting to know our somewhat difficult island neighbor, and that can’ t bode well for the future,” Lise Briant, a French high school teacher of English who spent a year in the UK as a student, said in an interview from her home in Paris.
A few days before the June 23 vote, about 100 vice-chancellors of UK universities signed an open letter in which they said leaving the EU could “undermine our position as a global leader in science and innovation, impoverish our campuses and limit opportunities for British people.” After the vote, UK University Minister Jo Johnson was quick to reassure students in a statement posted on the government’s website that both currently enrolled students, and those arriving in autumn, will have their student loans funding honored.