For students aspiring to study abroad, 2021 has been a whirlwind of a year. Started with deferred admissions and ended with a lot of policy changes. But as they say, all’s well that ends well.
In 2021, we welcome a more progressive government in the US that wanted to make it easier for students to come in and become immigrants. The UK too saw an over three times increase in the intake this year, as thousands of our students head there to benefit from the Post Study Work Visa. The year ended with Australia finally reopening its border after two years. With a competing PSW and an intake that happens in June versus September-October for UK & Canada, Australia is not going to lose any chance to win back students, their second-largest GDP growth driver!
Let’s take a slightly closer look at where we stand at the crossroads of December 2021 – Jan 2022.
Policy Roundup
It’s been raining happy tears for students. The world is finally opening up for those who want to latch onto the future, and become global citizens! And it’s not opening up just in comparison to Covid-era locks, but pretty much table-turning the entire last decade. Country leaders have identified and executed measures that have changed so much.
Canada meeting its 2021 target of 400,000+ new permanent residents: Canada,
about a week back, announced that it met its 2021 target of 400,000+ new Permanent residents in the calendar year. Immigration minister Sean Fraser mentioned a majority of these applications came from temporary workers already based out of the country.
This is a huge positive as it shows a very promised recovery from the 2020 number of about 180,000 PRs granted. It not only cements Canada’s position as “the immigration destination” but also gives other emerging destinations a run for their money.
USA waiving off mandatory interviews in the VISA process: Another welcoming and necessary step, USA recently announced that what used to be ‘the mandatory interview’, will now be on an optional basis, and the decision of the Consular Officer interview stays.
This measure, while applied for most non-immigrant visas, also sees validity extensions for students’ F & M type VISAs till 31st December 2022 in wake of the pending backlog.
Australia opening its borders for international students: By a long mile the biggest news of recent times, Australia has opened its borders for international students and has also established a travel bubble with India to bring in Indian international students.
2022 Outlook
The Anglo-world – aka UK, Australia, Canada, US – has its arms open. While other emerging destinations like Germany, France, UAE, etc are building infrastructure, policies, that can give them a seat at this table very soon. What also changes is the “outlook” of these students.
While in a previous era, students would rely on “lowest kilometre advice”, or to say whatever advice was most easily available around them – to now trusting the Internet to do that job. Just this year itself, we had organic traffic on our platform LeverageEdu.com grow from 300,000 a month to 7.5 Million a month, a whopping 25 times increase.
This one stat, tells you so much about the student of tomorrow! And when students change, do Universities have a chance not to? We had over 300 universities attend our UniConnect virtual fairs, attended by over 40,000 students. Of these 300, 220 Universities paid us to access premium features that would give them more control on the quality of students they want to bring in across programs, in line with the kind of job opportunities they see getting created at their campuses.
This truly is real change! Just like the entire world, students – the global explorers – also found healthcare added to their list of top priorities. How countries and their leaderships react to health crises builds or erodes trust for students. UK tripling it’s count and US losing more than one-third is a reflection of that as well, not merely the policies. So while countries like UK and Australia are bound to see a huge interest given their trust-building measures, US will have to fight its way back from behind starting 2022.
All in all, the students are winning, they are getting a chance to study the right program at the right Uni, & more importantly “in the right country”. They are now getting a fair chance to evaluate higher education with a “what kind of job it gets them” question. This outcome-first information-asymmetries-broken new world of studying abroad is good to look very different from its past shadows!
— Written by By Akshay Chaturvedi, Founder & CEO, Leverage Edu
Read all the Latest Education News here
Comments
0 comment