Education Move with Immigration Undertone–Will History Courses Become A Thing of The Past in Britain? – News18

Some of what British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said on university courses that lead nowhere we all know. That there are certain courses students pursue out of interest, that are not the most job-friendly. History, for instance. A student fired by ambitions of becoming the CEO of Apple one day is not likely to opt for mediaeval history. Sunak has not exactly said that history will be taken off a university syllabus. But his announcement to axe courses that lead to few jobs threatens several cousins of a history course that students pursue more for interest than for ambition.

The government has been careful not to spell out what some of these courses are. That would lead to specific challenges to such decisions that the government is not prepared to take on immediately but will have to eventually if the government were to go ahead. Any such decision would necessarily narrow education in Britain into utilitarian purposes from its more broad-based span at present. This then starts off a debate about what education should mean, and both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have challenged this policy already.

But there is a subtext here that takes the debate from education to immigration.

A number of such courses do not attract enough students – most students themselves are already as utilitarian-minded as the government would like them to be. That makes admission to such courses a little easier for foreign students. Closure of such courses would limit the number of foreign students coming to Britain for any kind of study at all. And a reduction in those numbers would to that extent feed into the claim the government has promised to make of a reduction in migration by the end of the year.

That reduction is at present quite out of line with what Rishi Sunak has promised – ahead of the general election early next year. A tightening for students has been indicated already, and the move to restrict courses on offer is only a step to deliver the immigration promise.

In this, the government will have the universities themselves challenging it. Not necessarily because they are ideologically committed to diversity in knowledge but because the diversity of students that come to these courses from abroad brings fees that keep the universities going. This is then less about commitment to knowledge than about the very existence of many universities.

The threat is not really to well-established universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, and The London School of Economics. It is the ‘new universities’ that would lose out. These were the old polytechnics that former prime minister Margaret Thatcher renamed universities. And they have thrived under that title by attracting substantial numbers of foreign students, principally from India and China. A number of these students are prepared to go for any course in any university, new or not so new, that they can get if they do not get their prime choices.

These are the courses, and those are the universities that the new policy will hit hardest. And this the government has set out to do for its own reasons, not all to do with education.