Some university Masters courses, popular with international students, do little to fill the skills gap International students can take masters degrees in “Transnational Queer Feminist Politics” and “Queer Studies”, prompting fears that courses which do little to fill skills gaps are being used as an immigration route.
Soas University of London, popular among international students, with 1,890 studying full time (2021-2022), runs masters courses in the “Anthropology of Food” as well as “Transnational Queer Feminist politics with special reference to the Middle East” – both costing £25,320 per year for overseas students (compared to £12,220 per year for domestic students).
The latter includes a module on “Queering Migrations and Diasporas” and Soas advertises scholarships for such courses.
One covers living expenses, tuition fees and round-trip airfare for "five Indian nationals," and the other covers candidates who are "nationals of Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Palestinian Territories."
At University College London (UCL), the most popular university with 22,885 international students (2021/22), international students can pay £31,100 for an MA in Gender, Society and Representation and an MA in Race and Ethnicity.
At the University of York, where 5,765 international students studied between 2021/22, overseas students can apply to do an MA in Queer Studies for £23,900, which allows them to explore “the cultures that shaped us, and the cultures we shape, through an intersectional queer lens.”
The course includes modules in “Gothic Bodies” and “Late Medieval Sexualities”.
Under current graduate visa rules, international students are allowed to remain in the UK for at least two years after successfully completing a course.
This goes up to three years for PhDs and other doctoral qualifications.
Analysis commissioned by UCL shows our international students contributed £1.7 billion to the economy in 2018/19 and this is estimated to have supported over 12,000 jobs across the UK.