As we all know, half of the UK’s fastest growing startups were co-founded by someone born overseas.
When we calculated that figure, free movement with the EU was still a thing. A lot has changed since then. We've moved to a system that's pretty open for skilled workers with jobs, but there's a huge gap in the market for people who want to move without a job offer (i.e. entrepreneurs). The UK’s new High Potential Individual (HPI) visa helps fill that gap and opens the UK up to the best talent from the rest of the world. It’s a move we called for, and welcome.
To be awarded an HPI visa, you must have attended a university that has appeared in the top 50 of at least two of the three following global university rankings: the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings, or the Academic Ranking of World Universities.
The problem is, these lists aren’t great at measuring what we want. They are great for measuring research output, the number of Nobel Laureates, and the quality of facilities, but they’re weak predictors of graduate labour market performance. That’s because they don’t even try. The closest we get is QS asking employers what they think of each uni.
We have a better idea. Or more accurately, economists Jason Sockin, Paolo Martellini and Todd Schoellman do. They’ve used real-world labour market data from Glassdoor for migrant and non-migrant graduates from around 3,300 universities across 66 countries.
Building on this work, Sockin and our Research Director Sam Dumitriu have found in True Potential that the HPI visa excludes graduates from many of the world’s top-performing universities. In fact, graduates from most of the top 25 global universities as measured by average earnings are not even eligible to join, including the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, which tops the list.
If the UK adopted our proposed method and allowed any overseas graduates who attended a university with higher potential earnings than the median-performing, currently eligible university, it would give graduates from approximately 100 universities spanning 13 different countries access to the visa.
The additional universities include many STEM-focused institutions, small liberal arts colleges in the US, and business schools. Of the omitted universities, 33% are from the United States, 22% are from Europe, and 17% are from India.
No system is perfect, of course. But we think supplementing the current list with ours would be a serious upgrade. And we’re not the only ones:
– “No-one was suggesting a better list [until now]” – Tom Forth
– “Completely agree with this” – Sam Freedman
– “Brilliant bit of analysis. Should be adopted by govt immediately” – Jonathan Simons
– “Fantastic idea for a paper. Anecdotally, I’ve already met quite a few US grads planning to stick around in the UK because of the HPI visa. Would be great to open it up further” – Julia Pamilih
– “Excellent thread on how to make the High Potential Visa better” – Matt Cifford MBE
– “A good thread arguing Britain’s new open door visa to the graduates of the world’s leading universities needs to have a more sophisticated metric” – Ben Judah
Finn(est) Hour
This week we also released the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Entrepreneurship’s report on Entrepreneurship Education. Written by Finn Conway and kindly support by finnCap, it calls for the Government to:
– make clear which minister has the responsibility for enterprise education;
– draft a Youth Enterprise Strategy for England;
– integrate enterprise into the National Curriculum;
– provide resources and funding for pupils to engage with entrepreneurial activity in schools;
– provide incentives for businesses and local enterprise partnerships to support and engage with entrepreneurship education.
First and foremost, if you haven’t done so already, read this letter and sign it here to show your support.
Second, we want to make sure this report sparks policy change. This is just the beginning (well, it’s not actually the beginning as we’ve been researching and campaigning on this for years). Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be making the case with Ministers, MPs, Peers and civil servants making the case for change. So will Sam Smith, founder of finnCap, who also wants to see change – listen to her from 33 minutes in on Sky.
We’ve now built a sizable network within a network of entrepreneurs, educators and experts who are passionate about this topic, but the more the merrier. If you care as much as we do, get in touch.
Finally, we have a couple of reports coming out around this topic. First, we’re looking at the role of applied learning in building an innovative mindset for Young Enterprise, and looking at how to improve the connections between FE colleges and entrepreneurs in their communities for Gatsby. If you know – or are involved in – a case study to illustrate best practice in either, get in touch with Dr Anton Howes.
Copy Right
We have a solid track-record of changing policy. Unlike some other think tanks that are aligned to a political party, we don’t run our ideas past the Government or opposition parties to make sure they agree, and we don’t write reports to test the water or lay the groundwork on behalf of political parties. We try to change minds.
Latest on the growing list is Anton’s copyright reform proposals, which are starting to become part of government policy. Since Fixing Copyright was published last year, Anton has taken part in various conversations with the Intellectual Property Office and BEIS about how the UK could encourage its AI sector by extending the copyright exception for text-and-data mining to everyone, not just non-profits. These were proposals also put forward in Seb Krier’s paper for us on Making the UK the best place in the world for AI Innovation. Now the Government has announced that it intends to adopt our policy, citing many of our precise arguments – particularly around the opportunities we pointed out for making the UK more competitive in AI following Brexit.
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