Ever hoped that one day a government body would develop a way for you to measure your self-worth and quantify your potential once and for all? Well, you’re in luck!
The UK recently launched a “High Potential Individual” (HPI) visa aimed at attracting the “brightest and best” from around the world to its soggy shores. If you qualify under the scheme you are welcomed into the country for at least two years, even if you don’t have a job offer.
So who counts as the brightest and best? According to the British government, an HPI is someone who has graduated from a top-50 ranked university outside of the UK in the past five years. You can see the list of the 37 eligible universities here. Twenty-four of the universities listed are in North America, and include institutions like Yale, Harvard and MIT. None of the eligible universities are in Africa, India or Latin America. It seems there are officially no bright people in any of those places, then!
It should be noted that you don’t have to graduate from any of these institutions with flying colours. So someone who scrapes by at Yale is still given preference over someone who graduates top of their class at a university that isn’t on the list.
Apologies to everyone who scraped by at Yale, but it goes without saying that your natural potential isn’t measured by which university you attended. Indeed, where you went to college is often more a reflection of your socioeconomic status than your inherent intelligence. In the US, a majority of higher educational institutes give preference to “legacies”: students with family connections. At Harvard, for example, the acceptance rate for legacy students is around 33%, compared with an overall acceptance rate of under 6%.
Having a family member on the alumni list is far from the only route to wangling your offspring into an elite institution. You can also get daddy to donate large sums of money to the school. While nobody knows exactly how Jared Kushner got into Harvard – perhaps it was his natural charisma –it may have had something to do with his father pledging $2.5m (£1.9m) to the university shortly before he was accepted. It certainly doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with his mediocre test scores.
While judging someone’s potential by the school they went to is clearly elitist and inaccurate, it’s also extremely on-brand for a country that is largely ruled by people who went to Eton then Oxbridge. While a lot of people at the top love preaching about “meritocracy”, the truth is that where you end up in life often has less to do with your natural talents than the economic status you were born into. Social mobility in the world’s richest countries has stalled since the 1990s and it has become harder and harder to climb the socioeconomic ladder.
While the UK is rolling out a red carpet for graduates from the likes of Harvard (where an undergraduate degree costs around $200,000), most other job-seekers have to navigate a complex points-based system and collect 70 points just to be able to apply to work in the UK. And it’s not easy: a PhD in a subject relevant to your job gets you just 10 points, for example. A job offer by an approved sponsor gets you 20 points.
And if you’re the “wrong” sort of immigrant altogether? If you happen to have fled a war zone and are trying to create a better life in the UK? There is certainly no red carpet for you. Instead, the UK government recently announced a plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Anyone who doesn’t want to go to Rwanda gets a trip back to the conflict zone they escaped from.
“Potential” suddenly becomes irrelevant to the government in such situations. A few years ago they tried to deport a student with a place at Oxford because of uncertainty over his immigration status. His potential wasn’t as important as where he was born.
The UK has defended its inhumane asylum policies by talking about the importance of strong borders. Most borders are full of loopholes, however. Residency and citizenship of many countries can often be bought if you invest enough money; see, for example, the billionaires buying New Zealand citizenship as insurance against the apocalypse. Citizenship has been thoroughly commoditized. Even if you’re not a billionaire, borders are far easier to traverse when you have an expensive set of qualifications.
The UK’s new HPI program is yet another reminder that borders only exist for the poor.
