The United Kingdom has written a kind of mobility that depends on the name of the university. A graduate of some of them can come and work without a company having hired them first. A graduate of the others cannot.
The visa is called High Potential Individual. It lasts two years, three years after a doctorate. In that time the graduate looks for work, takes a job, or sets up on their own. No signed offer is required at the start. The government page: gov.uk/high-potential-individual-visa. The universities it recognises, for the year of the degree: global universities list.
For a parent, the list answers a question that comes too late if you wait for the bachelor’s degree. Which universities will, on the day the degree is awarded, give the possibility of coming to work in the United Kingdom — and which will not?
The rank is the key
The United Kingdom builds this list from the top of the world rankings. Shanghai, Times Higher Education, QS. It limits the list to universities outside the country. Names families already say are on it: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, Tsinghua, Peking, the University of Tokyo, the National University of Singapore.
A child who graduates from one of them can apply for this route. A child who graduates from a university that is not on the list cannot. The country does not then weigh how well known the school is at home, or the fact that the degree is “international.” It looks at whether the university is in this set, in the year the degree was awarded.
A serious university, well known, chosen because it was within reach, remains a serious university. It does not place the degree on this list. Other universities do not open the same mobility.
A child who is in 6e today will graduate under the list of their own year. The names shift a little from one edition to the next. What the United Kingdom does stays the same: it reads the top of the ranking. That is the Top 50 we prepare, and that is what puts the degree in the world this list knows how to read. Why aim for the Top 50.
Study at Oxford, or graduate from Harvard
Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial are universities of this rank. They open the United Kingdom through another door. The HPI visa is written for a degree earned outside the country. When the child studies in the United Kingdom, at one of these universities, the mobility is called the Graduate visa. After the degree earned there, the graduate can stay and work.
The two routes say the same thing. The rank of the university is what makes the degree readable for the country. A degree earned somewhere else, at a university that is neither British and of this level, nor on the list, opens neither.
The Emirates and Hong Kong have written mobility of the same kind. There too, a degree from a university at the top of the rankings is the key. The graduates’ Golden Visa. The Top Talent Pass.
What this changes during the school years
The visa is applied for once the degree is in hand. The university is prepared while the child is still in 6e, in 4e, or in high school. That university is what will decide, years later, whether this door exists.
These universities compare children who come from different school systems. The SAT is that comparison. English, IELTS or TOEFL, is what lets the child follow classes once there. An activity held over time says who the child is, beyond the report card. Funding is prepared with the file. Liwaza Familles starts from 6e. Later, the diagnostic says what is still realistic for this child, and which step comes first.
The day-to-day work and the application season are already written: how we prepare this with your child, after Liwaza, how a child enters.