Tasmay Oza, 22, did not have a choice. A student from India, he had to scrounge for an additional Rs1.8 lakh to book a hotel room in the UK for the mandatory quarantine.
It “was a bit humiliating”, Oza says. Yet, he did it so he could fly back and resume his higher studies in the UK.
On April 23 this year, India was added to the UK's growing ‘red list’ of countries mandating Covid-19 travel restrictions. This requires travellers to quarantine for 10 days/11 nights at a government-approved hotel in the UK.
The bill for this comes to £1,750. That’s Rs1.8 lakh for stay, three meals a day and two Covid-19 tests. Twin-sharing comes to only slightly lower – £1,200 or Rs1.2 lakh per person.
“I paid the full amount because I could not find anybody to share the room with me when I arrived on June 7,” Oza says over a Zoom call from his room in East London. Oza is from Anand in Gujarat. He’s taken an education loan to pursue an Associateship of King’s College course.
The cost of studying and living in the UK comes to at least £22,000 per year (Rs22.6 lakh). Arranging a lakh or more over and above that is turning out to be the biggest hurdle for UK-bound students right now – even visa processing and vaccination are not a bother by comparison.
The reason: The quarantine cost is not covered by education loans. Students who were returning to resume their studies didn't have a lot of time to organise the extra funds. And though some universities are now coming forward to subsidise or refund the entire amount for some students, most have stayed out of it.
This unexpected cost has forced Indian students to stay back in their home towns and pursue online classes. Some have deferred their admissions. Others are searching for students to split the quarantine bill with them. Efforts to borrow money have been made. Crowdfunding has been mooted. Talks are on with colleges to bail them out.
Waive it off
“Students are very stressed,” Sanam Arora, head of the National Indian Students and Alumni Union (NISAU), UK, says.
NISAU has written to the education secretary of the UK as well as Universities UK, a group that represents 140 universities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, to look into the matter and provide relief to Indian students by waiving the quarantine fee or refunding it.
Arora says they haven’t heard back from the education official yet but the latter has promised action.
Meanwhile, amid growing discontentment, a few universities have come forward to cover the quarantine cost. Some have promised a partial refund, others will pay fully. Most are bailing out the incoming batch of students; a few are considering the case of returnees too.
Arora lauds this gesture but points out that these are 15-17 universities from over a hundred in the UK, and they are quite well-off at that. What about the plight of students enrolled in other varsities? she asks. That number would be significant, considering 37,500 visas were granted to Indian students in 2019 alone.
In another development, the department of health and social care is reviewing the quarantine rule to allow discounts for travellers facing financial hardships. This came after a law firm challenged the government’s exorbitantly-priced policy, which came into effect on February 15, 2021, and which can invite a fine of up to £10,000 or 10 years in jail, if not complied with. The lawyers have also asked the government if it will repay the costs incurred by travellers already.
Rush for post-study work
According to Arora, the students who are most affected are those who are returning to colleges after a break or because they got stranded in India following the second wave. “New students, who’ll come in by November, have time to factor in the extra £1,750 whereas returning students, they are being forced to pay to come back. It’s a mandatory charge by design,” argues Arora, an alumnus of the London School of Economics.
They must fly back because the UK has reopened for the Post Study Work (PSW) visa. Initially, students were expected to be in the UK by June 21, 2021, to apply for the PSW visa but the deadline has been extended to September 27, 2021, following the concerns around the Covid-19 spike in India and the quarantine costs in the UK.
Oza got unlucky here. When he landed on June 7, the deadline for the PSW visa was still June 21. If he had known in advance, he would have waited for the quarantine cost to reduce or be written off. “I am on a student loan, so I didn’t want to burden my family further. I told them I won’t go back. I won’t do the internship that I am doing at the House of Commons. But my parents put up a strong face and managed the funds for me,” says Oza.
Ramyasri Nune, 26, from Hyderabad knew about the PSW visa extension but she did not wait. She was on Day 5 of quarantine in Birmingham when we called recently.
The student of investment analysis at Aston University explains her decision, “I had deferred my masters by a year because of the pandemic. Then my flight for January 2021 got postponed because the corona crisis peaked in the UK. By April, I was down with Covid-19. So this time, I didn’t want any uncertainty, third wave or travel ban to come in the way of my studies again. I want to access the library and other university resources to complete my dissertation now.”
The quarantine fee was a “burden” but she was lucky to find a roomie to split the costs and her college has also offered to consider her case for a refund of £500. “I am on an education loan. I did approach my bank to cover the quarantine but they declined,” says Nune.
Banks won’t foot the quarantine bill, Rakesh Baleshwar from Eduloans, a platform that facilitates loans for overseas studies, explains. “Education loan is determined by factoring in expenses like college fee, rent, insurance and cost of food and even laptop. We can consider increasing the loan amount if the college hikes the fee,” says the operations manager.
Cost of dreams
“£1,750” has become the talking point on their WhatsApp and Clubhouse groups.
The common points of concern go something like this:
One can book a decent room with three meals for £85, so what justifies the steep government tariff?
Why can’t students isolate in the college hostel when these are going unused?
Foreign students bring billions to the UK’s economy, so why not excuse them in this time of need?
Will the UK have enough quarantine hotels for students when they arrive in hordes in September for PSW visas or to start their academic year?
Moneycontrol wrote to the UK’s education secretary and the Universities UK team more than a week before publishing this story, raising some of these issues. This story will be updated with their responses.
Jetal Zala, who’s studying research in business and management from the University of Stirling, says: “I started my masters in October 2020 but I haven’t studied in my university campus yet. All my studies have been online and it’s disappointing because I wanted to meet different students, engage in group discussions, use college infrastructure, gain exposure – nothing has happened. I haven’t got the worth of my college fee (£15,000) and I am being asked to pay £1,750 now,” says the girl from Bhavnagar, Gujarat over a call.
Some colleges in the UK have resumed face-to-face teaching and Zala wants to experience that but there is no help in sight. She shares, “I contacted my friends and relatives (to lend me money) but the pandemic has been financially hard for everybody. Most are surviving on savings. They could not help and I understand. I thought of crowdfunding but did not pursue it because why would somebody pay my quarantine charges? I even wrote to my college if I could rent a studio apartment to isolate because that’s cheaper. I got no response.”
Prashant Goyal from Chandigarh has put off his travel plans too. A student of the Edinburgh Napier University, he is exploring his option to qualify for the hardships fund that the UK had initiated for students last year. But the acceptance rate is low; he knows that.
The pharmaceutical science and pharmacology student explains why the maths of overseas education is beyond loans. “I used to make £800 (Rs82,000) a month from part-time work. That used to take care of my living expenses. But think of it, I am paying £500 rent (Rs51,000) for a room I am not using since December and I have no earnings to cover it up.”
The UK is set to fully reopen on July 19 even though health experts have expressed concerns about the climbing Delta variant cases. If the unlock doesn't come through, how will students find part-time jobs to pay their overhead costs?
“But you know what’s worse? A student in the adjacent room came back from India last month. He paid for the quarantine but he’s still attending classes online!” Oza leaves us with that thought.
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