The UK Border Agency has announced new rules regarding UK higher education institutions and foreign students studying under a student visa. These new amendments are tweaks to the student visa points-based system aimed at closing loopholes and reducing the number of bogus student visas.

From next year onwards, universities and colleges will have to monitor the attendance of overseas students enrolled in courses in their institutions. These measures are intended to help curb what the media (and the UKBA to some extent) is saying is rampant abuse of the student visa system for immigrants to come into the UK to work instead of study.

Universities and colleges will be asked to limit the number of resits that foreign students are allowed on exams, in order to prevent students from trying to purposely extend their stay in the UK. This will help deter and curb the problem of immigrants coming in under the student visa to work instead of study.

In addition, attendance monitoring will have to be conducted to ensure that foreign students are actively participating in lectures, labs, and other requisites of their courses. At many universities, attendance taking is non-existent for both domestic and foreign students at the moment. Many fear a big-brother style environment if attendance recording, or “roll call”, is taken. In addition, this segregation or special treatment for foreign students might result in tensions or resentment between local and foreign students, who have up to now been integrating and interacting well on campuses nationwide.

This new measure will only work to catch bogus students enrolled in legitimate higher education establishments, which is at the moment very rare because of the high tuition fees in legitimate universities as well as the strict academic entrance criteria. These measures will be less effective or entirely useless in bogus or sham colleges, who enrol students with no intention of providing them with an education, and make their money from immigrants who want to obtain a student visa to enter and work in the UK. These sham colleges will in all likelihood be able to orchestrate false attendance records.

More details on the measure will be announced next year. Three schools at the University of Edinburgh are undertaking attendance monitoring pilot schemes on behalf of the UKBA to evaluate the effectiveness of such a scheme.