Did you hope that one day a government body would develop a way to measure its own value and quantify its potential once and for all? Well, you’re lucky!
The United Kingdom has recently issued a High Potential Individual (HPI) visa aimed at attracting the ‘brightest and best’ from around the world to its wetlands. If you meet the conditions of the scheme, you are welcome in the country for at least two years, even if you do not have a job offer.
So who is considered the brightest and best? According to the British government, HPI is a person who has graduated from a top 50 university outside the United Kingdom in the last five years. You can see the list of 37 eligible universities here. Twenty-four of the universities listed are in North America and include institutions such as Yale, Harvard and MIT. None of the eligible universities are in Africa, India or Latin America. There don’t seem to be officially bright people in any of these places, then!
It should be noted that you do not need to complete any of these institutions successfully. So someone who gets involved in Yale is still preferred to someone who is graduating from a top university that is not on the list.
Apologies to everyone who rushed to Yale, but of course your natural potential is not measured by which university you attended. In fact, the place where you studied in college is often a reflection of your socio-economic status rather than your inherent intelligence. In the United States, most higher education institutions prefer “inheritances”: students with family ties. At Harvard, for example, the admission rate of inherited students is about 33%, compared to an overall admission rate of less than 6%.
Having a family member on the alumni list is far from the only way to put your offspring in an elite institution. You can also get Dad to donate large sums of money to the school. Although no one knows exactly how Jared Kushner got to Harvard – perhaps that was his natural charisma – this may be due to the fact that his father promised $ 2.5 million (1.9 million British pounds) for university shortly before admission. It certainly doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his mediocre test results.
Although the assessment of someone’s potential at the school they attended is clearly elitist and inaccurate, it is also extremely a brand for a country that is largely run by people who went to Eaton and then to Oxbridge. While many people at the top like to preach about “meritocracy,” the truth is that where you find yourself in life often has less to do with your natural talents than the economic status in which you were born. Social mobility in the world’s richest countries has been stagnant since the 1990s and it is becoming increasingly difficult to climb the socio-economic ladder.
While the UK is launching a red carpet for graduates like Harvard (where a bachelor’s degree costs around $ 200,000), most other jobseekers have to navigate a complex points-based system and collect 70 points just to apply. operates in the United Kingdom. And it’s not easy: a doctorate in a subject related to your work brings you only 10 points, for example. A job offer from an approved sponsor brings you 20 points.
And if you are the “wrong” type of immigrant in general? If you accidentally run away from a war zone and are trying to create a better life in the UK? There is certainly no red carpet for you. Instead, the UK government recently announced a plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Anyone who does not want to go to Rwanda gets a trip back to the conflict zone from which he fled.
The “potential” suddenly becomes irrelevant to the government in such situations. A few years ago, they tried to deport a student based in Oxford due to uncertainty about his immigration status. His potential was not as important as where he was born.
The United Kingdom has defended its inhumane asylum policies, speaking of the importance of strong borders. However, most borders are full of loopholes. Residence and citizenship in many countries can often be purchased if you invest enough money; see, for example, the billionaires who buy New Zealand citizenship as insurance against the apocalypse. Citizenship is fully traded. Even if you are not a billionaire, the boundaries are much easier to cross when you have an expensive set of qualifications.
The UK’s new HPI program is another reminder that borders only exist for the poor.
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