The Perfidious Albion’s brain drain

Is the United Kingdom also affected by brain drain? Or worse, is it even encouraged by some eminent figures of the national intelligentsia? This is the impression at first sight that can be drawn by recent declarations of the dean of Hockerill Anglo-European College, one of the most prestigious universities in the country. After announcing that university tuition fees will triple, a few months ago, Simon Dennis, the dean, publicly exhorted his own students to emigrate and to continue their studies abroad. “If a student can attend the École normale supérieure in France, which is one the best universities in the world, paying out only £180 per year, why should he/she pay out  £9,000 to remain to study in Great Britain?”.

There is no doubt that the economy of the United Kingdom  came out of the economic crisis badly bruised. The country has difficulty in recovering pre-crisis growth rates and the cuts policy implemented by prime minister Cameron and his Lib Dem number two Nick Clegg was particularly severe, hitting strategic sectors of the welfare state. This led at least 500 thousand people to take to the streets of London, last Saturday, in order to protest against the latest budget manoeuvre. Yet, university education is by far one of the sectors that were least affected by the government’s squeeze on public finances. The threefold increase in tuition fees, which does not affect the education system since it has always been a class system, must be set in a more general context, where youth unemployment continues to grow and families and enterprises still find it difficult to recover after the crisis. How should the proposal of dean Dennis be interpreted?

There are two possible reading of it, both of them based on the famous metaphor of the glass half-empty or half-full. The first pessimistic one derives from the fact that even a country like Great Britain, which has traditionally attracted researchers and brains from around the world  over the years, could be forced by the economic situation to witness a steady flight of talents. The second optimistic one is that the crisis and the increasing interdependence of the international education system are incentivizing more and more systematically the mobility of young students even in the country whose language has become the lingua franca par excellence of this mobility. From this point of view, it seems that the United Kingdom is now discovering what the other European countries have been experimenting for many years, that is that the opportunity to study in a country where a different language is spoken enriches students culturally and humanly. Could the crisis possibly help to make the anglocentric attitudes of a part of the British university less provincial?

(Translation: Francesca Cannino)