Bristol University has unveiled a range of scholarships for what they identify as “refugees and asylum seekers”, allowing them to attend the Russell Group institution for free.
The announcement comes as a record number of pupils across British VI forms and colleges received their A-level results and found they had a place in one of the over 100 universities in the country. The majority of these students will take out loans to cover the £9,000 a year tuition fees — a fact that the University of Bristol will conspire to put off new arrivals to the country from applying for a place themselves.
After borrowing for living costs is considered, many students now leave university with £40,000 of debts.
Developed by the University’s Migration Research Group, Bristol has now launched what they call the Sanctuary Scholarship Scheme. The fund will contribute towards the fees of Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, as well as advanced study in Doctorate research, and will pay the full fees of those who are not eligible for help from the government reports the Bristol Post.
Despite their being in the professional areas in the highest demand in the United Kingdom, the “refugees and asylum seekers” will be excluded from funding for Medicine, Dentistry, Veterinary Science, and Engineering Design courses.
The University’s Vice Chancellor Hugh Brady is quoted by the paper, remarking: “I’m delighted to see this scheme come to fruition. I am sure we will have applications from many excellent prospective students, and we look forward to welcoming them to study at our university”.
“We know there are factors that make it difficult for people from refugee and asylum-seeking communities to apply to university. Their previous studies may have been interrupted, they might not have evidence of their previous qualifications or their qualifications are not transferable. Our scheme has been designed to accommodate these factors, so please don’t let them stop you from applying”.
Despite the clear optimism of the Vice Chancellor, the experience of European nations during the migrant crisis have shown incidences of so-called refugees with enough experience to take on a PhD, Master’s, or even a Bachelor’s degree are actually vanishingly rare.
Breitbart London reported in October on a leaked German government report on the educational attainment of the over one million migrants that had at that time come to the country from places like North Africa, the Middle East, and Persia. The document from the Federal Employment Agency found some 81-per-cent of migrants arriving had absolutely no qualifications whatsoever, having failed to even complete school and attain fluency in their own language.
Only an estimated 8-per-cent had achieved an academic qualification, a figure in stark contrast to claims made at the start of the crisis that migrants tended to be better educated than the average German. Based on these findings, the agency anticipated hundreds of thousands of new benefit claimants over the court of the next year.