For Nicole Fan, a graduate visa held out the promise of an exciting future. After completing two degrees, she tried, and struggled, to find a job because the visa that gave her a right to work in the UK was making that impossible.
When someone tells you that you have a bright future ahead of you, you believe them. Of course you believe them – especially if they’re your university tutors, beaming at your graduation and saying you’re destined for great things. But it’s been nearly two years since that day, and I’m now a semi-jobless, semi-homeless and very tired graduate, with two fancy degrees and too much experience with British bureaucracy. Turns out the real test came after my last exam, in the form of the unassuming – but all-consuming – graduate visa.
A post-study scheme meant to attract ‘the best and brightest global talent’, the graduate visa lets international students work here after graduation, typically for two years and seemingly without the usual red tape. No employer sponsorship is required; no job offer is needed to apply. You can work in pretty much any job, in any field. The application takes just a few clicks.
It seemed like the perfect opportunity for someone who wanted to start a career here. I’d moved from Singapore to the UK at the age of nineteen, shivering off the plane but undaunted by the weather. Everything felt so much bigger than the tiny country I came from; everywhere I turned were traces of history, art and literature – from the blue plaque saying Virginia Woolf once lived down the road from my university, to the artists’ quarters I found along a quiet cobbled street in Forest Hill. My love for this expansive, interesting, offbeat side of British culture was why I chose to study English Literature here, first at UCL and then at Oxford. It’s also why I wanted to stay on after my studies.
So I applied for the graduate visa, hoping that it’d bring me one step closer (albeit nearly £3,000 poorer) to the life I’d moved across the world to build. Those dreams were promptly dashed. I was well aware that the job search wouldn’t be easy, even with good grades, several internships and a smattering of extracurriculars. I’d even started sending out applications while still writing my final dissertation. But I didn’t expect it to be nearly impossible.
Post-graduation life quickly settled into a grim routine of doomscrolling job sites, cold-emailing recruiters and firing off applications that soon stretched beyond publishing and journalism to anything I was remotely qualified for. Ironically, the only people who approved of my resumé were the two strangers who deemed me flatmate material in London. The real employers, not so much. Endless interviews bounced me between every rung of the org chart; application tasks had me churning out press releases and campaign ideas that disappeared into the void. Occasionally, a personality test would even roll around, asking me to rate everything from how happy people were when they saw me (a bashful ‘somewhat’), to how good I was at making decisions (revealingly, ‘neither agree nor disagree’).
At first, I blamed the market. 2023 had been brutal for job seekers, with graduate vacancies dropping by around 40% compared to pre-pandemic levels. I was lucky to even get callbacks, I told myself, trying to remember that the rejections weren’t personal. Until an interview made me realise that, actually, some of them were.
My call with the recruiter had been going well; she said I was a perfect fit and just needed to confirm my right to work. But when I assured her that I was on the graduate visa, the line went quiet. That means I can work in the UK for two years, I added, thinking she might be unfamiliar with the scheme. She sighed.
‘I’m sorry, but we’re really looking for someone we can see staying with us long-term – someone already settled here.’
I blinked. ‘So… just British people then?’ She wished me luck and hung up.
They say once is an incident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. After getting turned down dozens more times – for roles supposedly open to anyone ‘with the legal right to work in the UK’ – I got the pattern, loud and clear. My time-bound visa, legal as it was, didn’t cut it. Ironically, this ticket to stay was precisely what drove employers away.
‘We have to be strict,’ one hiring manager explained to me. ‘Otherwise, many people would ask to be considered on the basis that they’ll get a skilled worker visa later.’ He said that as if the graduate visa was some kind of sneaky loophole. As if wanting to stay on afterwards (through a perfectly legal mechanism, no less) was somehow suspicious. Others share his view. Earlier this year, conservative think tank Policy Exchange decried the graduate visa for letting foreign students ‘unlock valuable working privileges’ and becoming ‘an open door for immigration’.
I’m not sure what valuable privileges are on offer though, because 75% of graduate visa holders have found applying for jobs difficult or very difficult, with many unable to find work, let alone long-term sponsorship. For me, it took hundreds of applications before I was finally hired – first in an editorial role and then in a journalism traineeship – followed by several hundred more after my short-term contracts ended. All the organisations I worked at, whether big multinationals or small local firms, regretfully informed me that they couldn’t keep me in the long run. As for the rare company that seemed to welcome foreign graduates, it was often suspect – like the trading firm that urged me to pay £4,000 upfront for their ‘training programme’, or the all-male startup whose CEO looked nothing like his LinkedIn photo.
The recurring theme: employers don’t want to hire someone they might have to financially back later. And I get it, to some extent. Sponsoring a skilled foreign worker costs around £1,000 per year and requires meeting a minimum salary threshold – one that’s jumped by nearly 60% since 2023 and is well above what most graduates can expect to earn. Even corporate moneybags like HSBC and Deloitte dropped their foreign graduate hires to save themselves the hassle and the money. So it’s no surprise that I was flailing. Caught between dead-end roles and dodgy jobs, it was hard to eke out a living, harder still to admit it to the people around me.
That instability quickly spilled over into my housing situation. Midway through my first year on the visa, my flatmates and I were evicted when the owner decided to take back the property. Finding a new place proved, unsurprisingly, to be a nightmare. It was London, after all – and I’m a non-British passport holder, which one in four landlords reportedly refuse to rent to. Hours of trawling SpareRoom and OpenRent finally landed me another flatshare, granting me a yearlong reprieve from surly letting agents. But when that tenancy ended and I had less than twelve months on my visa, anywhere that wasn’t an overpriced shoebox became virtually unattainable.
Worn down by it all, I eventually stepped back from the manic job hunt and turned to freelancing. Precarious as it was, at least the work was mine to manage and detached from my now accursed visa status. I also moved out from the flat I’d been renting when its lease ended to stay in an arrangement that I’ll not disclose, since it’s probably something housing agents won’t be too happy about. Well-meaning friends flocked to console me but I never quite knew how to deal with their pitiful stares or dubious advice. One suggested I get married so that I could stay; another pressed me to trade crypto for quick cash. ‘I know you’ve probably done this already,’ a third said sympathetically, eyes wide with concern. ‘But have you asked ChatGPT?’
It’s hard not to define my past two years here by all this tumult, stress, shame and isolation. I thought the future would be bright, or at least brighter than this. But of course, there’s more to this story than I can fit in. The people, the places, the little things I can’t quantify. The good times amidst the bad times; the realisation that somehow, I’ve built a little bit of a home and a little bit of a life – one that feels like it’s slipping away but still is mine, and always will be. So even though I’m leaving in a few weeks, I’ve yet to really say goodbye. London is humming in the evening light, and for now at least, I’m still here.
