When I saw that message on WhatsApp, I couldn’t just move on as if it were another forwarded message. A young student from my country, India, who came to the United Kingdom with dreams and hopes of a bright future and a successful career…
This student, unable to bear the financial burden caused by unemployment, had hung himself.
A country that sells itself as a land of dreams, freedom and opportunity couldn’t offer a job to a student who completed his education within its own universities.
Business as usual
I found it odd at first that mainstream media barely paid attention to this news. But when I did some research, I realised that this tragedy was not an isolated case.
Suicides among students due to financial distress and unemployment have been appearing in the news for a long time – so much so that the media seems to have decided that this is just “old news”, no longer worthy of attention.
But for me, it was shocking to see how many students have taken their own lives in recent times due to the crushing burden of unemployment and mental distress.
A country that fails to support young minds is a country in absolute decline. When a 21 year-old, who should be living a passionate life – loving, traveling, and dreaming – is driven to the extreme of ending his own life, it reflects the highest level of systemic decay.
Tuition torture
It costs tens of thousands of pounds – approaching the £100,000 in Russell Group universities – for a non-British student to complete their education in the UK, including tuition fees and living expenses.
No middle-class Indian family (let alone working-class or peasant!) can afford this without taking out bank loans, draining their entire life savings, or even pledging family gold passed down for generations.
For these families to send their child to study abroad means to sacrifice everything they have.
The student, in return, carries an enormous financial burden after graduation. If they fail to secure a job, the mounting bank interest on their student loan, along with the pressure of repaying pledged assets back home, starts to suffocate them.
But after all this burden, how are students meant to repay their debts when they are squeezed by the realities of a stringent job market?
No future
Only 61 percent of graduates are getting full-time jobs within the first 15 months of completing their studies. The unemployment rate for individuals aged 16 to 24 rose to 13.9 percent between August and October 2024, up from 12.2 percent the previous year.
Meanwhile, 24.6 percent of 21-30 year-old graduates living in England are in low to medium-skilled employment. Countless Indian students who graduate from UK universities are forced to work in retail stores and food delivery services like Uber Eats, just to pay off a fraction of their enormous debt.
I once spoke to an Uber driver from Tamil Nadu, India, who had been driving in the UK for two years just to repay part of his loan burden. As his graduate visa (the UK’s post-study work visa) neared its expiration, he was preparing to return to India – still buried in debt.
UK universities extract everything from international students – their money, their labour, their hopes – only to give them a two-year grace period to find a job with sponsorship to continue staying in the country.
If they fail, they are discarded like waste, forced to leave with nothing but financial ruin and shattered dreams.
Unemployment is a feature of capitalism
Unemployment isn’t an accidental failure of capitalism – it is a deliberate feature of the system. As Karl Marx wrote in Capital:
“The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army.”
Capitalism consistently produces this “reserve army of labour” – a surplus of unemployed workers – to keep wages low and maintain the power of the ruling class.
This reserve army ensures that workers remain desperate, their demands for better pay and conditions are ignored, and capitalists retain control.
The harsh reality is that this system deliberately allows the suffering and deaths of unemployed workers to keep its profit-driven machine running.
Without dismantling capitalism and overthrowing the ruling elite, there can be no real solution to this endless tragedy faced by overseas students.
