According to the Home Office, the number of applications for a student visa by Turkish citizens has exceeded 60 thousand.
The Home Office has released data on the number of student visa applications received from Turkey in the last 10 days. The Home Office has replied to the questions of Londra Gazete demanded under the Freedom of Information Act, confirming that it has accepted approximately 52 thousand of the over 60 thousand applications.
The data revealed that until the implementation of the new Tier 4 system in 2009, approximately 8 thousand Turkish students were entering the UK. The last 5 years of the pre-Tier 4 period, between the years 2004 and 2009, a total of 44 thousand 224 students had applied for a student visa. Of these, visas were issued for 36 thousand 538 applications.
From 2009 onwards, the Home Office altered the visa system, switching to the point based Tier 4 system. Authorities, not only believe that the new system did not make it any more difficult for the student to obtain a visa to study in the UK, but also that the regulations should be toughened further against these applications.
During the period between 2009 and June 2013, 18 thousand 73 Tier 4 applications were made by Turkish citizens and 14 thousand 890 were accepted. The number of applications rejected by the Home Office was revealed as 7 thousand 247 between 2004 and 2009 and 2 thousand 971 between 2009 and June 2013. The Home Office was expecting for the number of entries into the UK to decrease with the Tier 4 system. However, according to a research conducted on universities, that receive a significant amount of income from the international students, one in every three universities have increased their number of enrollments in September.
According to the data of the UK Council for International Affairs, a total of 435 thousand 230 foreign students came to the UK in 2012 to study. Out of these, 302 thousand 680 are non-EU citizens.
GOVERNMENT CONCERNED WITH THE INCREASE IN STUDENT VISAS
An increase in the number of student has been observed not only in universities, but also in the UK’s 600 colleges. Again, according to the data of the Home Office, four thousand of the illegally residing foreigners in the UK had entered the country with student visas. In 2010, the Labour government had proposed an amendment to the law that demanded a high level of English to be known by the incoming students. However, this became obsolete with a group of English-course providers lawsuit opened in the High Court. English UK, the umbrella group of more than 440 English language schools, had termed the requirement to have a high level of English before attending English courses, as “ridiculous”.
The Home Office has declared that the number of foreign students entering the UK increased by 75 thousand since the last year to 313 thousand 11. The data released by the Home Office has not only brought the subject back to the public agenda, but has also caused for the worries of the authorities to re-surface regarding the increase in foreign students in the country.
