Pulse: What might a change to the Graduate Route mean this time?

If you've landed on this thinking I've mislabelled a post from the grand old days of early 2024 then, alas, I have to inform you that the (new) UK government is apparently pondering a (new) set of changes to post-study work visas. At least, according to a report in The Times.

The Graduate Route, for those newer to PG, is a post-study work visa introduced in 2021. It offers successful graduates the right to remain in the UK for two years after a Bachelors or Masters and three years after a PhD. This stay doesn't need sponsorship by a university or employer and there's almost no restriction on the kind of employment someone can undertake with this visa (it isn't possible to work as a professional sportsperson). It's been hugely important to postgraduate recruitment (Indian Masters enrolments doubled the year after the Graduate Route was introduced).

The Times reports that the government's forthcoming immigration white paper will include plans to restrict post-study visas to people holding 'a graduate level job'.

So, what would that actually mean and, more importantly, what does our Pulse data reveal about the potential impact?.

Talk of restricting the Graduate Route to graduate jobs actually stems from the previous review of this visa carried out by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) at the request of the Conservative government in 2024.

Though the MAC ultimately recommended no change, it did question whether Graduate Route holders were typically working in graduate level roles and suggested the government record course outcomes for applicants. Linking the Graduate Route to 'quality' of employment would therefore offer Labour a lever to pull on legal migration with a basis in this existing review.

Actually achieving a link between Graduate Route eligibility and graduate roles would be difficult.

First, there's the definition of a graduate job. You can also go down several rabbitholes (and that really does feel like the right analogy) with David Kernohan on this topic. Essentially, jobs change, roles change, degrees change and trying to aggregate all of these into some rigid correlation is very complex. And may or may not be a graduate job.

But, according to the government source in the Times, the plan is not to link post-study visa eligibility solely to roles, but rather to "careers in which salaries do not typically rise beyond a certain level after several years".

I can think of several high profile graduate jobs in which salaries do not typically rise beyond a certain level after several years. They include some very important jobs I hope the government is thinking of too.

Regardless though, any actual link would require big technical changes to the way the Graduate Route works.

Right now, someone is entitled to the graduate route visa because they are a graduate, not because they are doing a graduate job (however defned).

Linking eligibility to employment and/or earnings would be a fundamental change requiring some form of sponsorship (I'm not sure how else we determine that someone is in a certain job).

All of this means that, as Michael Salmon observes on Wonkhe, the change may not actually be to the Graduate Route but to the Skiller Worker visa that comes after (or instead of) it. This already requires sponsorship linked to roles and salary thresholds.

But let's take the alleged policy at its implied word for now. If the government were to somehow restrict Graduate Route eligibility to graduates in graduate level roles, what impact would that have on peoples' desire to graduate from UK universities?

Thanks to Pulse, we can already model how changes to the Graduate Route specifically might impact interest in the UK, using data we collected during the 2024 MAC review. My analysis then focussed on whether cutting the length of the visa would deter students (this had been trailed as a likely recommendation). But we also asked students how they felt about eligibility being linked to a job offer and/or a minimum salary:

Data here is for all prospective international students in our sample considering a Masters in the UK (I'll save drilling down into specific audiences for when we're dealing with policy rather than a news article).

Job and salary restrictions sit squarely in the middle of the two 'cut duration' options and, as you'd expect, requiring a minimum salary is more impactful than simply requiring a job offer.

But the drastic cuts that were allegedly on the table at one point last year would have been worse. And around a quarter of this audience wouldn't be deterred by job/salary requirements.

Most importantly, we need to remember that the same newspaper responsible for this week's leak last year incorrectly predicted an announcement that the Graduate Route would be cut to 6 or 12 months (prompting our research above). So let's wait and see.

And if a drastic change is on the way, we can advocate and communicate to ensure its potential impact is properly understood.

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