Americans doing Graduate work in the UK

To all,

I just have a quick question about doing graduate work in the UK.  If you complete a graduate degree at a UK educational institution, are you then allowed to stay and live and work in the UK upon your completion of your degree?  I am an American who has just finished a BA from the University of California and am pressuring immigration to the UK and was wondering if attaining a degree from British institution might me a good vector for that.  Thank you.



-Sirsparky

To all,

I just have a quick question about doing graduate work in the UK.  If you complete a graduate degree at a UK educational institution, are you then allowed to stay and live and work in the UK upon your completion of your degree?  I am an American who has just finished a BA from the University of California and am pressuring immigration to the UK and was wondering if attaining a degree from British institution might me a good vector for that.  Thank you.



-Sirsparky

No.  You need to get a work permit after you complete your studies.

Well that puts me back at square one.  What if the length of your study, exceeds the residence requirement for becoming a citizen in the UK?


-Sirsparky

Expat, I'm not sure that's right. Isn't Scotland doing some sort of program where if you complete a degree there you can work there for another year or so?

Sparky, if you get a student visa for study in the UK but for some reason don't complete it, you can apply for an extension of it. This used to be fairly easy to do (I know one woman who did it several times!). However, it has become more expensive to do and it may have become more difficult to do.

BTW, no idea for sure, but I don't think that residence in the UK as a student counts towards becoming a UK citizen...

Expat, I'm not sure that's right. Isn't Scotland doing some sort of program where if you complete a degree there you can work there for another year or so?

That measure is being challenged in court down South, and the new Secretary has a good case - as it is indeed technically illegal for a member of the UK to have a different immigration policy.  Strengthening the Secretary's case is the fact that Scotland has attracted a significant number of EU immigrants since the Eastern bloc countries were admitted.  It's a load of tosh, IMO, b/c it buys it only buys you two years, anyhow.  After that, you are back at square one - in need of work permit sponsorship.

You must be a student for 10 years before being able to apply to settle as a permanent residency.

It's an immigration policy designed to keep studying from being a route to permanent immigration.  The US and many nations have a similar policy in place. 

A good option is to train for a shortage profession - such as social work or nursing.  This way you can easily gain a work permit, do you 4 years, and then apply for ILR/permanent residency.

You need 11 months on ILR to be eligible to appy for nationality.

Yup, you'll need that year of ILR to get citizenship - so even if you wanted to use your student visa time toward citizenship, you can't get ILR directly from that student visa. For example, I had a student visa for a year and now have had FLR for nearly a year after having got married. But I still can't apply for citizenship for another two years. I still have to have had ILR for a year, which I can't get until I have had FLR for two years. So my student visa time does me no good whatsoever toward citizenship....

At the end of your grad. work you'll have a few extra months on your student visa, in all likelihood which you could use to look for work. I think expat's suggestion to train for a shortage profession is a good one!

I realise this is a bit of an old thread -
But 1) If you graduate from a UK institution  in one of the areas covered by the Science and Engineering Graduate Scheme you can stay and work for 12 months. That's not just in Scotland.
(in good news for me, now that I'm most of the way to finshing my  Master's my field - Computer Science - which was previously disincluded from the scheme has been added to the scheme. This simplifies staying for me.)

2) Both that and the Scottish scheme are very useful indeed if one is in the postion I was in: I couldn't make enough working where I lived to get the earnings points for HSMP. Living and working in London however, I should be quite capable of finding a job that pays enough - either in just salary or in salary + bonuses. So for someone like me -a mid-career professional in the right sort of field (computer programming in my case), who has decided to go back to get a higher degree - the  SEG Scheme (or the Scottish one) gives us a very good opening to get to stay for as long as we want. (And to have gotten to start living here straight away as I worked my way towards the goal of staying under a visa category that actually leads to  ILR.)

There's also the MBA scheme, but you have to earn your MBA at one of the 50 top business school in the world.