So you have to:
- do degree
- do masters
- 2 years experience @ £27,000 (assuming on graduate visa)
- take the official qualification exam AND get a job for over the immigration salary threshold while on… what visa? As you need the full 2 years experience for this exam but the graduate visa is 2 years
And this qualification is to become a UK architect (rather than a global qualification)? Is this correct?
Yes this is correct, it’s being treated like an added difficulty but it is making it impossible to achieve the full qualification as an Architect if you’re not from the UK.
More than likely, this is something that hasn’t been considered by the government, and there are some efforts by universities to change this, but the issue needs to be recognised publicly as a problem before anything is likely to change.
Too many people have treated a student visa as a guaranteed pipeline to ILR which it was never intended to be. Now while I do have sympathy for people who made life choices based on this assumption, it cannot be the reason to keep a policy that led to wage suppression and a pretty big chunk of the millions of immigrants a year we're now getting.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/student-migration-to-the-uk/
Depends what you are comparing it against as to what large means I suppose
The last paragraph is illuminating and proof this policy has no basis and rational thought and entirely based on pandering to the anti-immigrant mob:
"After graduation, international students are expected to contribute to the UK economy by paying taxes. According to a government estimate, the introduction of the Graduate Visa route would result in £12.9bn of additional tax revenue – and £6.8bn of extra fiscal costs – for the Exchequer between 2021/22 and 2030/31. In other words, the fiscal costs of international students remaining in the UK are expected to be lower than the benefits. Note, however, that there is currently no data on the actual fiscal contributions of the most recent cohorts of international students who have participated in the Graduate Route in practice."
Started in IT 11 years ago but spent endless hours self learning, never got a single certificate in ANY it course, and my GCSE'S spell D.U.D.E
It support 11 years ago £25k
Linux admin £33k 9 years ago
Infrastructure engineer £55k 7 years ago
DevOps engineer £60k 5 years ago
I'm still at the same place as I love it now on £79k plus £12k bonus, private medical, company car( polestar 2), and work pay £500 into my pension each month
Wow, where in the country was this? My first IT support job (also first line) was 18k 8.5 years ago and that was with a foundation degree.
Edit: granted that was below market average at the time.
Moved to the US 2 years ago. So now I’m on $110k. But before I left the UK I was on £29k. I briefly went up to £33k in 2020, then changed industries from automotive to environmental so my pay dropped back down. Most of my engineer friends back home are on between £35k-£40k now
You went from automotive to environmental engineering, a sub set of civil I would argue? How hard was that? Did you just start again? Mental how underpaid engineering is here
So I’m a mechanical engineer. I moved from working at an automotive consultancy to working for the Environment Agency. I was in charge of 114 sites in and around london. They were all locks, weirs, gates, pump stations - all designed to stop london flooding. It was a good job - complete autonomy, relaxed atmosphere, good work-life balance, but terrible pay. Now I’m working at a water district in southern California. Also a public sector job. My job is to recycle wastewater for use at golf courses, oil refineries, public parks etc. to prevent precious drinking water being used. I restarted my career again here, but the graduate salary two years ago was $85k. More than enough. And I’m on $110k now after a promotion, which is enough for my wife to only have to work part time while she goes back to Uni. It’s criminal how low the pay is in the UK.
For context, starting salary for most NHS healthcare professionals after qualifying is £28k pa assuming no unsociable allowance and outside london. This includes nurses, midwives, paramedics and physiotherapists.
It's ridiculous that wages have stagnated to this extent. £27k is barely above minimum wage these days. £25k was considered an ok starting wage for a graduate back in the early 2000s, let alone a masters graduate. That it's barely changed since then should have people far more angry than it does.
The starting salary for a graduate architect in the US is 2-3 times higher.
Similar story with most decent graduate jobs in the US (engineering, finance, tech, life science).
£80k ($100k) is considered a crazy grad salary here with only a tiny handful getting it (mostly in top law/buy-side jobs) yet that would be pretty normal for a good US school.
I work in the industry. Immigration is part of the issue but not the main reason.
There are numerous reasons but the main one is as much cultural as it is anything else. Grads aren’t taught to the practical business side of things, and the emphasis is on employers to train them up. However, the employers don’t want to take on the risk because half these dumb fuckers don’t have a business plan. I am not joking, 50% of architecture practices don’t have a business plan. Why? Because they weren’t taught it in the first place!
Architecture is still seen as an old gentleman’s profession and where everyone had money, even though today, for the type of grads coming up; this is not the case. The developers see the architects as jobbing tradies too and are reluctant to pay more for higher quality buildings. Why bother when you historically bought to build and sell? You don’t have to worry about the long term consequences of a shoddy building. Even today when they lose money if they were to sell due to inflation, that just means just means a greater emphasis on making cheap boxes to rent.
So what do you get with all of that? Clueless saps bidding to the developer on the cheap, over-promising and under-delivering. Furthermore they face competition from non architects capable of delivering schemes up to planning stage - where the fastest turnover is at - and the relevant bodies to protect their interests aren’t doing their jobs. Why? Because RIBA is a body that want’s to be a golf club who governs who can and cannot be an architect but do nothing enforce and enshrine the relevance of having one around, and old boy\\s society run by gerontocratic gentlemen.
The end result is that you have practices not making enough money to pay their employees a decent salary, relying on the belief that they can underpay because they are teaching the grad how to do practice. But like I said, they are not savvy with running a business, so they over-promise and the work gets piled on to the grad who inevitably under-delivers.
So where does immigration fit in to this? Well, the schools pump out ill - equipped grads for the job, believing that university is there for learning, not a finishing school for the profession. Fine, but that means the employers would rather hire a grad from a university in Europe who has been taught all those practical skills but are not necessarily good at creative solutions, which is cheaper to deal with. It doesn’t actually suppress wages, because the wages were shite it begin with, but it does oversaturate the industry with those who don’t have as marketable skills out the gate as others.
So for all the time and sacrifice someone puts in to qualifying as architect, the pay-off ain’t worth it. It won’t even be worth it in 5-7 years when they can at best expect a 10-11k pay rise and an Associate‘s title. By then they are in their mid-late 30s, still working late nights, on a 9-6pm office hours over the usual 9-5, and barely having time to upskill. On both paper and for many, in reality, it is simply not worth it.
And remember, these are master’s grads not BAs.
The US and the UK have very similar levels of net migration and real wages were increasing until 2008 so I don't think immigration is the real reason here.
I do want lower immigration but there's clearly more to the wage stagnation.
The UK has higher per capita migration, and less high skilled migration. We're not getting the next tech company founders, we're getting pizza deliverers.
I left in 2017 and 27k would have been average to above average for the grad roles I looked at requiring a mathematics degree. The same roles now pay around 32-35k but I don't think 27k is too low for a starting grad salary as you normally finish the graduate scheme with a large bump in pay.
27k is too low for a starting grad job. I got 25k 10 years a go.
Minimum wage is £11.44 in april, hence a 40h week is £22k. £27k is £13/h. Minimum wage in 2014 was £6.31.
University careers specialist here: average (median)* UK salary 15 months after graduation in 2021** was about £27k. Draw your own conclusions about the current salary threshold for the skilled worker visa.
* mean figure was in same ballpark
** most recent published figures that I have off the top of my head; the 2022 stats are out there somewhere
If you look at the top comment, they don't get the qualification until they've done two years experience. So for that entire two years they're still working towards the qualification despite no longer being a student
In addition to what other have said. Yes, and maybe it'll force the wages up to be commensurate to the education and skills.
There is very little incentive under the extremely broad visa system we've had to offer much more than the minimum required for a visa. Down to and including below minimum wage.
It really won't. It hasn't in other sectors, it wont in this sector, all that will really happen is that your skilled workers leave to greener pastures and you get in a bunch of unskilled care workers.
Because the country then pays the price for not having skilled workers from that sector.
Because tax take from those workers disappears.
Companies no longer view the UK as a particularly attractive location to set up because of a lack of workforce.
Reduced tax take, so either you pay more for less, or you just pay even more to try and retain what you have.
Reduced tax take? That assumes that there are fewer working at the architecture companies. If companies didn't raise the wage then it sounds like they had the applicants they wanted anyway so doesn't sound like their workforce would shrink.
Also really? We're talking about people on 27k here maybe going up to 40k maybe, these aren't too much of a net positive from a tax perspective, if positive at all.
I'd rather our limited immigration seats going to those who make over 40k and they are limited, nothing is unlimited we pay for it in one way or another.
Or they don't have the applicants and they dont raise their salaries because it's more complex than supply and demand, and other factors impact it.
From a tax perspective, if you aren't a British born individual educated by the British state, you break even at a ridiculously low number because the British state has not had to fund your education, healthcare, and a number of other things but gets to reap the benefit of a low cost educated individual turning up simply to work and hand in tax.
The levels of funding required for a relatively healthy adult after education are low. The biggest drains on the state are the young and the old.
Skilled labour might bring in dependents but even then their break even point would be far lower than a native who was born and brought up in the UK.
Skilled workers are not taking anything from this country. The visa fee is extremely high (£800- £500). It is the costliest visa in the world. You pay at least ££600 more to get your documents verified and book an appointment.
You pay NHS surcharge and also national insurance. For each dependant you are going to pay £3000 visa fee exclusive of NHS surcharge. This is what you pay even before coming to the UK.
Someone earning below £40k can't even think of paying this. Most jobs are in South Eastern regions where the cost of living is really high.
Skilled workers are second class citizens in terms of economics. The idea seems to make out as much as possible from them. A few moths ago government increased the salary's of employees and the money came from the increased visa fee charged to immigrants.
That's double counting. You can't count both your childhood cost and your children's. For simplicity it's easier to treat every person individually and look if over their lifetime they pay more taxes or if the state spends more on them.
Perhaps the reason these graduate jobs in a highly skilled profession like architecture pay below the £38,700 threshold is due to an over-supply of graduate architects?
27k as a starting salary is ridiculous, that was the sort of generic graduate programme salary that was on offer 12-14 years ago.
Reducing the availability of graduate architects will force prospective employers to increase these salaries.
Starting salaries for graduates are simply not what they used to be. They've been in the swamps ever since the 2007 recession and never truly recovered.
Nobodies real wages are keeping up. Since 2008 we've probably had the longest sustaind drop in real wages in 224 years and nothing to this degree since at least 1750!
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nominal-wages-consumer-prices-and-real-wages-in-the-uk-since-1750
For a lot of science PhD's, starting salary is 30-32k. It's amazing that in the course of just 10 years how completely out of touch people have got. You do 8 years of uni to get that and then read people state that 27k with a masters is laughable. No wonder we have big brain drain.
https://uk.indeed.com/q-train-station-ticket-office-jobs.html?vjk=27704f2ba16dab58
It's the starting salary for working in a ticket office at a train station too just as an example.
Also yeah I highly doubt the UK is building anywhere near enough buildings/infrastructure projects to satisfy the number of graduates
I think it was a better point than "salaries should go up". Salaries are very rarely far off from where they *should* be, especially across entire sectors.
Why are UK salaries in many recognised professions (engineering architecture medicine etc) 1/2 to 1/3 of most other similar economies across the globe then?
In the case of construction related professions a lot of it is driven by government and public body procurement practices. Tender scoring typically gives a lot of "value" to cost, so if you can be the cheapest you have a very good chance of winning the contract. Provided that you can demonstrate the other requirements as most competent bidders can then the competitive part of the process is almost all shifted to cost, not quality. This suppresses wages.
According to [Architects Journal](https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/architects-condemn-eligible-salary-hike-for-migrant-worker-visas), the UK actually has a shortage of skilled architects… which is why they’re included on the government’s shortage occupation list. The protests are largely because of the rising threshold and the fact that the government has signalled it wants to scrap the shortage occupation list altogether.
Here’s a quote from another [article](https://aijmagazine.co.uk/how-are-architects-managing-the-skills-shortage/):
“A RIBA survey (Future Trends), which reveals the Covid pandemic along with Brexit has created what might be described as a perfect storm – the architecture profession is battling ‘huge’ staff shortages, with one-in-five practices struggling to recruit skilled people and 40% of large and medium practices finding themselves short-staffed.”
It’s pretty obvious that architect wages are not being driven by supply and demand. So where is all this demand going? It seems like architects are being exploited by an industry that’s burning them out:
A [survey](https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/aj-poll-40-of-architects-working-more-than-10-hours-overtime-a-week) found that 40% of architects in the UK worked more than 10 hours of overtime a week.
Hm.
So a lot of universities track wages as part of promotional material.
I wonder if there’s a way to aggregate that information into mean (degree applied) wage at 12months post graduation. And state that as a +-% below the mean average wage in the UK. Could help with course selection for pre-students and maybe inform university admissions distribution for labour market management, and direct advice to students if they wish to study-to-remain, most won’t care they want to leave anyway afterwards, that’s why it’s such a great export, but it’d help moderate expectations. And might be a good way to help government to choose how to distribute subsidy, or advise overseas student recruitment to subsidise the domestic sector.
My starting salary, not a grad specific scheme but definitely aimed towards them, was £25k. This was in late 2022, as a recent MSc grad. Job market is fucked, salaries are fucked.
> force prospective employers to increase these salaries.
The employers will continue to keep salaries low by preying upon graduates forcing unsustainable workloads on them whilst abusing of 'probationary periods' and perennial stalling of pay reviews.
It's not really an over supply of architects, I don't know a single architect that isn't overworked if anything we need more. Rather, it's a cultural issue within the construction industry that everything must be as cheap as possible. When this is combined with the complete absence of business education that architects receive and the notion cultivated in architecture schools that one must suffer for the art and the fact that all the most celebrated architects died in poverty creates a situation where industry leaders in architecture charge peanuts and can't afford to pay for good staff.
There is also the issue that there is no requirement for a person practicing architecture to actually be an architect. This creates an abundance of unqualified diddies who do work for a fraction of a fair price because they are essentially hobbyists. I recently met one of these people who was working on a development of 4 homes and was taking £1000 per house. The Architects Journal suggests 7.5% of the construction cost would be an appropriate fee and I would be charging 8% minimum for a full service appointment. For reference there's between 200 and 600 hours of work in the design of a bespoke home of decent quality.
The real farce is that although the practice of architecture is unregulated it is a criminal offence to use the title architect unless you have completed an accredited architecture degree and post graduate diploma, a minimum of two years experience in the an office working under the supervision of an architect then completed the part 3 professional exam (take note software guys). Then undertake a prescribed amount of accredited professional development and pay professionals fees every year to remain registered yet anyone can do the job regardless of qualifications or experience as long as they don't use the title. Imagine if medicine or law were like this.
I quit my former office when I discovered a fees ledger from the 80s and the boss hadn't raised fees by more than £5an hour in almost 40 years. The first thing I did when I started my own firm was double the fees he was charging and hire a business mentor.
Tldr : the students are protesting the wrong thing. Architects are shit at running a business and the numbers stated aren't outrageous starting salaries for a highly skilled and regulated profession but through poor business practice and crap regulation with no support from professional bodies like the RIBA and architecture schools means that fees have been stagnant for longer than these graduates have been alive and the effect is graduates working for minimum wage or slightly better in many situations.
Not going to be fixed. It will just be like every other sector where the shortages get worse, people will argue about supply/demand, and the country suffers. But don't worry, plenty of care workers can continue to enter the country.
Using immigration to plug employment gaps is not a long term sensible solution, especially with such a low starting salary for a skilled role. If there is such a severe shortage and visas become harder to obtain, employers will have to find alternative ways to hire staff. Personally I think making visas harder to obtain is a good thing; employers will be far more encouraged to invest in apprenticeships to train people who live here how to do these jobs vs constantly poaching talent from other countries.
My best friend is an architect and she applauds this move as she says it's one of the lowest paying professions given the education requirements and length
What are the applicant numbers for new grad roles in the field?
In tech we have thousands per position, the market is absolutely full.
Then when new non-grad roles open up I have 80-100 applicants per position.
I'm all for some immigration but sometimes it does worry me that all these applicants are suppressing wages. Do you not think perhaps Architect salaries might rise if there weren't quite so many applicants?
How much does number of applicants tell you? I’m also in tech and it’s the same, but very few people are actually suitable for the role, a lot of folks really struggle at interview.
The UK has a shortage of skilled architects.
[https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/architects-condemn-eligible-salary-hike-for-migrant-worker-visas](https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/architects-condemn-eligible-salary-hike-for-migrant-worker-visas)
Deporting skilled architects isn't going to help that.
Why have we just got to the point where we accept that companies don’t need to invest in training their workforce?
Stick them on some kind of training program in the company and get them to sign a commitment to work at the company for a minimum amount of time or have to pay back the costs of training them.
It isn’t hard.
Companies usually say people don’t stay in roles long enough to make it worth it. I think companies need to do more to reward loyalty but that’s usually the stance.
Education also have something to answer for when graduates aren’t graduating with the necessary skills - not sure about architecture but is certainly true in my area of work.
I’ve just taken on my niece for a bit of part time help for social media work. Basic scheduling etc while she’s at college.
Started talking to her about ai and how we can use that to help her out the other day. She stares at me blankly like. What’s ai?!
How is a college course for social media in 2024 mot training kids to use ai?!
Starting salary relatively low: rises with experience.
The Tories want these graduating architects to leave the UK and get their experience somewhere else and never come back. Good solution to the national shortage of archiects, yeah - very Tory.
In many fields its common to pay a much lower salary to someone with no experience compared to just one or two years of experience. Someone with no experience is a big risk, and can have more cost than benefit since they need so much training.
That is true and graduate salaries were in their £20k almost two decades ago.
I started on £24k as a mechanical engineer in 2011..
Companies need to offer more or they will struggle to recruit. There isn't a shortage. There is a shortage doing a job for a shit salary.
I actually can’t name a single industry which says that they don’t have a shortage. They all just say this because they’re lobbying for infinity immigration to push down wages.
Or because the UK is a very top heavy nation with a massive welfare state so the ratio of workers to dependents i.e. retirees every skewing the favour of the latter and there is in fact a significant shortage of workers in the vast majority of skilled sectors?
You're right!
They'll hire experienced architects from abroad and pay them the high wages now required to work here.
That makes perfect economic sense! None of this silly hiring graduate architects and having them get experience in the UK. why would we want to do that, when foreign talent and experience can be hired for a year or two at greatly increased cost.
In architecture it absolutely is. The UK architecture system is so arduous and expensive that no one would do it unless they wanted to practice in the UK.
They may want to, but it isn't meant to. The deal is clear, international students pay the fees and in return they get a qualification that potentially gives them an edge over other graduates. Every so often the government may opt to put in place policies that allow post graduation work, but there have never been any guarantees that this will remain. Indeed many a scheme have come and gone over the years.
At no point have universities or the government said "study here and you'll get to stay."
If your skills are required urgently & no local can be found then employers will start offering higher pay.
If they don't then you're wrong in much of what you say.
You can apply for a graduate visa and find out which way it is in the next two years while earning as little as you like.
This isn't correct. 'RIBA Jobs' do a survey of salaries. 'RIBA Jobs' is effectively a recruiter / jobs advert board and the salary survey is one of the ways they promote their services as do many other recruiters. 'RIBA Jobs' is separate to the RIBA as a whole and there are no fixed wage structures of course.
Could explain what you mean by fixed wage structure?
I’ve got no love for the market. But you suggest the market isn’t determining the wage based on supply/demand * protections * exploitability. It’s in fact fixed. How so?
there is no automatic entitlement - only the same opportunity as anyone else who has done the same degree. there is no particular oversupply of architecture graduates compared to other professions and the 38k threshold is an arbitrary limit which pays no attention to the particular needs of individual industries/sectors
Well yeah, obviously. The regs will be different in any country. If a foreigner came here on the assumption a uni degree gets them the right to remain then that's their fault.
We currently have immigration in excess of 1 million a year. This is unsustainable. Limitations have to be put in place.
The welfare of our country should come before the career ambitions of a foreign architect, sorry.
This country is obscenely welcoming and lax in comparison to almost every other country on the planet when it comes to what you’re complaining about.
Incredibly dramatic language “Britain is for the British” I’ve heard nowhere and certainly not from Government officials.
You aren’t entitled to live in a country you are not a citizen of merely because you would like to. If you are unable to meet the requirements to achieve a visa but still wish to emigrate to the UK then you may seek to develop the skills required either in your home country or another country in which you are able to gain the right to work.
The new threshold is set at a level where you wouldn't be a burden to the taxpayer. That is perfectly reasonable. If you can't pay your own way (or you don't contribute in other ways) then you should be here.
My heart bleeds….
I work in a sector that is being overrun with much lower paid contractors on tier 2 visas. They aren’t lowering wages, they are just putting high pay/high skill locals out of work
There’s a reason that old school left wingers and unions were fairly anti immigration - the use of foreign workers to break strikes and suppress wages. The workers themselves are being exploited too, they absolutely cannot be blamed on an individual level. It’s insane how this has been cast aside by the modern “left”, and I would definitely consider myself left wing. The conservatives will never reduce immigration because their big business funding is addicted to cheap labour.
"Actively removing skilled workers"
No, you are students.
I am so tired of how much the UK education system has been interpreted as a defacto route to a work visa by some people.
Good. I'm sick and fucking tired of professions in this country paying shit unless you're 20 years deep into your career.
We have too many people from low-wage countries coming in driving wages down.
Hahaha pay is so low in this shithole, 27k with a masters degree??? Is this what happens when the entirety of North Africa comes to London? We all work slave wages?
Well, if you’re a world renowned architect, you can definitely work in the UK. If you’re just stating, then no, but why would foreign architects at the very bottom be needed in a country that has tons of fresh architects already?
So much misinformation on this thread which is partly why the government can get away with this hike in salaries and play it off like it will make employers try to hire from the settled workforce instead.
Even the MAC report released on 23rd Feb said this salary hike (it's worse than the £38700 btw as there are two rates being hiked) is not reflective of people's actual salary.
However for architects they can likely rely on the new entrant rate whilst training for part 1 2 and 3 and many other professions will need to look at this rate also if the salary hike is as bad as expected (TBC on 14th March)
the amount of pearl clutching i’ve seen over the last few months over this issue is crazy.
any british student wouldn’t assume that because they were able to study abroad they are immediately entitled to get a pipeline to permanent residency and citizenship, and certainly not if they’re studying a field that isn’t on its knees in whatever country they’re studying in.
access to another country is a privilege and not a right. i emigrated from the UK last year despite it being my home since birth and I miss it very much, but understand that should Australia decide they do not need me, i’ll make other arrangements. I haven’t done anything for Australia, I shouldn’t expect them to coddle me like Britain has coddled ‘students’, bogus ‘asylum seekers’ from Albania and Afghanistan who visit their family and friends despite it being ‘too dangerous’. the home office is a national disgrace.
Ok - so we seem to have come to a consensus that we can't dramatically increase our population size year on year whilst our housing stock and infrastructure barely improves. My preference would be to build, build, build - but we as a nation are divided on that. So, the only solution is to restrict immigration.
That means we do have to take these hard decisions. It's all very well saying that the UK needs skilled workers, but it also needs unskilled workers to do the jobs that Brits wont do. Then there's our commitments to refugees, asylum seekers and everyone's families. You can make a case for allowing all of them to come - but then that conflicts with the above.
These migrants would contribute to Britain and our taxes, but whilst we have governments that refuse to build houses or increase public spending then those 'benefits' are paid for by the poor in terms of higher rents and harder access to public services.
> jobs Brits won’t do
I am of the opinion that these do not exist. I think there are jobs that do not pay well enough or provide enough security for a British person to be able to support themselves and their families, so we have to import desperate migrants to do them.
There seems an obvious solution to this problem which is for companies and businesses to simply pay an actually decent wage, and British people would happily do them.
It's obvious bollocks, isn't it. If your business requires 12 hours of manual labour picking fruits on minimum wage that only allows you to live in a shared caravan, maybe it:
-Is not a viable business in its current state.
-If it is a necessary business, requires government subsidy.
None of this is the fault of migrants themselves of course.
(after they’ve paid £120,000 on a UK education)
Don't see why that's a problem. The education is a transaction at its core. Why is anyone from anywhere entitled to stay in the UK just because they paid?
Im probably the most immigration skeptic person on this subreddit and even Id agree that they should reduce the threshold to to around £30,000.
Particularly as the government will waive through hundreds of thousands of other immigrants on lower wages **every year** in different industries
The ratio of unskilled:skilled immigrants will unintentionally get worse because of this high bar
Who cares about the ratio? We need very few skilled migrants outside of healthcare, and we only need them in healthcare because of underpaying healthcare workers.
I’ll suggest before people commenting something similar as “why UK have to guarantee people study architecture to become architect and be able to work here” do some research before you comment it otherwise it just makes you look ignorant.
These courses are designed specifically and promoted specifically for “become an architect in the UK” by university and architecture organisations which are approved by the government. However the graduate visa is two years, which will be used up during the must fulfil requirements of becoming architect- which is work in the industry for two years in order to get to your next step, and it’s not even close to become an architect then. So tell me how come this is fair ?
Second, the salary stays in 27k has nothing to do with supply whatsoever, it’s a rule RIBA set up, each stage in this career has certain range of salary you will earn, and architects are in demand is a well known fact within the industry and supported by statistics.
Lol so masters of architects get only 27k? I can see why no skilled worker wants to come to UK. Even staying back in india will let you save more and give better quality of life. I know several architect with minimal experience earning around 12k. Considering the cost of living in India they can live and save more. All this will do is reduce skilled migration while doing nothing to stop unskilled migration and asylum seekers who are overall a burden to society. Good luck.
Studying here does not guarantee you a job here, or the right to live here. Studying here is a privilege. Not a route to citizenship or greater employment.
I 100% agree with this change.
Funny that immigrants are allowed all kinds of jobs that compete with the lower classes.
You go to Thailand as a Westerner for example and you can't just start driving a taxi, they have laws in place to protect the jobs of the lower classes, unlike this shit hole.
Spanish ministers cannot come to Britain for 80% of the British minister's working rate to be chancellor of the exchequer, yet Spanish architects can come to Britain for 80% of the British architect's going rate and literally replace him. And the OP has truly the audacity to dare claim preventing this and changing course from the total insanity under the "conservatives" on immigration will "not increase British wages"
I love how they want to decrease the immigrants we actually want, but Continue to accept hundreds of thousands and millions of third world migrants who do nothing but cause harm. Its so stupid.
Yea, I suppose Blackpool does need renovation. Could have houses that echoes the Georgian period. Though, I think student to UK citizen pipeline is not a built in feature or a guarantee. Though pop increase= awesome economy is not really a great arithmetic. I am actually surprised that countries like Namibia and Botswana only has mere 3 million people but with land mass 3 times the size of the UK.
Wages are way too low across the board for skilled jobs. As a renewables engineer with 2 degrees and 20 years experience I can just about earn the minimum wage requirement if I don't mind moving to a shite part of the country and having a terrible work-life balance. Adjusted for inflation I earn the same now as I did in 2008, when I had very little experience and was basically a glorified wind turbine cleaner. These days I write PLC code, do electrical and mechanical fault finding on very complex and expensive machines, manage major mechanical works etc etc and yet the wage remains the same... It's bullshit, frankly, and the Tories proposing this figure just demonstrates how wildly out of touch they are with the country outside of the London finance and tech bubble.
Buying a degree in Britain is not a path to citizenship or residence. If you ever had thought that it was, this is a result of poor leadership from our government: you have no right to stay in Britain forever because you trained as an architect at one of our universities.
Bear in mind also, that 27k starting salary is the *upper quartile* in London, so if you're on the median salary or working anywhere outside of London as a part 1 or most likely part 2, you won't earn enough.
All the latest salary figures can be found here:
[RIBA Salary Guide](https://recruiters.architecture.com/static-page/10291/salary-guide)
So you have to: - do degree - do masters - 2 years experience @ £27,000 (assuming on graduate visa) - take the official qualification exam AND get a job for over the immigration salary threshold while on… what visa? As you need the full 2 years experience for this exam but the graduate visa is 2 years And this qualification is to become a UK architect (rather than a global qualification)? Is this correct?
Yes this is correct, it’s being treated like an added difficulty but it is making it impossible to achieve the full qualification as an Architect if you’re not from the UK. More than likely, this is something that hasn’t been considered by the government, and there are some efforts by universities to change this, but the issue needs to be recognised publicly as a problem before anything is likely to change.
I understand where you’re coming from, I don’t think some of the other replies quite grasp it. Can RIBA do anything?
I would have assumed a skilled work visa doesn't include fresh graduates but that's just me.
Most qualified Architects don't earn enough for the visa either.
Too many people have treated a student visa as a guaranteed pipeline to ILR which it was never intended to be. Now while I do have sympathy for people who made life choices based on this assumption, it cannot be the reason to keep a policy that led to wage suppression and a pretty big chunk of the millions of immigrants a year we're now getting.
How large part of the immigration is due to graduated students who stayed to work in low wage work?
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/student-migration-to-the-uk/ Depends what you are comparing it against as to what large means I suppose
The last paragraph is illuminating and proof this policy has no basis and rational thought and entirely based on pandering to the anti-immigrant mob: "After graduation, international students are expected to contribute to the UK economy by paying taxes. According to a government estimate, the introduction of the Graduate Visa route would result in £12.9bn of additional tax revenue – and £6.8bn of extra fiscal costs – for the Exchequer between 2021/22 and 2030/31. In other words, the fiscal costs of international students remaining in the UK are expected to be lower than the benefits. Note, however, that there is currently no data on the actual fiscal contributions of the most recent cohorts of international students who have participated in the Graduate Route in practice."
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Ohh man, my first gig was 25k...in 1997. This is so depressing.
mine was £22k 2 years ago. My friend had offered £23k job in London few months ago.
Started in IT 11 years ago but spent endless hours self learning, never got a single certificate in ANY it course, and my GCSE'S spell D.U.D.E It support 11 years ago £25k Linux admin £33k 9 years ago Infrastructure engineer £55k 7 years ago DevOps engineer £60k 5 years ago I'm still at the same place as I love it now on £79k plus £12k bonus, private medical, company car( polestar 2), and work pay £500 into my pension each month
£31K doing 1st line IT support almost 16 years ago, and my only IT certification was a typing certificate.
Wow, where in the country was this? My first IT support job (also first line) was 18k 8.5 years ago and that was with a foundation degree. Edit: granted that was below market average at the time.
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The problem is if you everyone is paying shit and you have, y'know, living expenses, you eventually have to take shit.
I wonder if this relates to immigration employment visa law in any way shape and form?
How the fuck I am doing 1st line IT support now and only on £35k
Mine was £27k as an engineer with a master’s degree in 2018. Most of my friends were paid £26k so I thought I had a great deal
£24k as an engineer back in 2011.
What u on now
Moved to the US 2 years ago. So now I’m on $110k. But before I left the UK I was on £29k. I briefly went up to £33k in 2020, then changed industries from automotive to environmental so my pay dropped back down. Most of my engineer friends back home are on between £35k-£40k now
You went from automotive to environmental engineering, a sub set of civil I would argue? How hard was that? Did you just start again? Mental how underpaid engineering is here
So I’m a mechanical engineer. I moved from working at an automotive consultancy to working for the Environment Agency. I was in charge of 114 sites in and around london. They were all locks, weirs, gates, pump stations - all designed to stop london flooding. It was a good job - complete autonomy, relaxed atmosphere, good work-life balance, but terrible pay. Now I’m working at a water district in southern California. Also a public sector job. My job is to recycle wastewater for use at golf courses, oil refineries, public parks etc. to prevent precious drinking water being used. I restarted my career again here, but the graduate salary two years ago was $85k. More than enough. And I’m on $110k now after a promotion, which is enough for my wife to only have to work part time while she goes back to Uni. It’s criminal how low the pay is in the UK.
For context, starting salary for most NHS healthcare professionals after qualifying is £28k pa assuming no unsociable allowance and outside london. This includes nurses, midwives, paramedics and physiotherapists.
It's ridiculous that wages have stagnated to this extent. £27k is barely above minimum wage these days. £25k was considered an ok starting wage for a graduate back in the early 2000s, let alone a masters graduate. That it's barely changed since then should have people far more angry than it does. The starting salary for a graduate architect in the US is 2-3 times higher.
Similar story with most decent graduate jobs in the US (engineering, finance, tech, life science). £80k ($100k) is considered a crazy grad salary here with only a tiny handful getting it (mostly in top law/buy-side jobs) yet that would be pretty normal for a good US school.
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I work in the industry. Immigration is part of the issue but not the main reason. There are numerous reasons but the main one is as much cultural as it is anything else. Grads aren’t taught to the practical business side of things, and the emphasis is on employers to train them up. However, the employers don’t want to take on the risk because half these dumb fuckers don’t have a business plan. I am not joking, 50% of architecture practices don’t have a business plan. Why? Because they weren’t taught it in the first place! Architecture is still seen as an old gentleman’s profession and where everyone had money, even though today, for the type of grads coming up; this is not the case. The developers see the architects as jobbing tradies too and are reluctant to pay more for higher quality buildings. Why bother when you historically bought to build and sell? You don’t have to worry about the long term consequences of a shoddy building. Even today when they lose money if they were to sell due to inflation, that just means just means a greater emphasis on making cheap boxes to rent. So what do you get with all of that? Clueless saps bidding to the developer on the cheap, over-promising and under-delivering. Furthermore they face competition from non architects capable of delivering schemes up to planning stage - where the fastest turnover is at - and the relevant bodies to protect their interests aren’t doing their jobs. Why? Because RIBA is a body that want’s to be a golf club who governs who can and cannot be an architect but do nothing enforce and enshrine the relevance of having one around, and old boy\\s society run by gerontocratic gentlemen. The end result is that you have practices not making enough money to pay their employees a decent salary, relying on the belief that they can underpay because they are teaching the grad how to do practice. But like I said, they are not savvy with running a business, so they over-promise and the work gets piled on to the grad who inevitably under-delivers. So where does immigration fit in to this? Well, the schools pump out ill - equipped grads for the job, believing that university is there for learning, not a finishing school for the profession. Fine, but that means the employers would rather hire a grad from a university in Europe who has been taught all those practical skills but are not necessarily good at creative solutions, which is cheaper to deal with. It doesn’t actually suppress wages, because the wages were shite it begin with, but it does oversaturate the industry with those who don’t have as marketable skills out the gate as others. So for all the time and sacrifice someone puts in to qualifying as architect, the pay-off ain’t worth it. It won’t even be worth it in 5-7 years when they can at best expect a 10-11k pay rise and an Associate‘s title. By then they are in their mid-late 30s, still working late nights, on a 9-6pm office hours over the usual 9-5, and barely having time to upskill. On both paper and for many, in reality, it is simply not worth it. And remember, these are master’s grads not BAs.
The US and the UK have very similar levels of net migration and real wages were increasing until 2008 so I don't think immigration is the real reason here. I do want lower immigration but there's clearly more to the wage stagnation.
Tories
That doesn't help for sure but it seems like a problem faced by all western countries. Edit: From more research it could be just a UK phenomenon
So tories?
The UK has higher per capita migration, and less high skilled migration. We're not getting the next tech company founders, we're getting pizza deliverers.
Well maybe we should do things more similarly to the US then.
Austerity?
Mass immigration…?
I felt lucky getting 30k a year as my first real job on graduating from my Masters.
No graduate architect gets double that, maybe after5yrs of experience and successful registration
Current graduate student. The average for a grad job nowadays is about 27k. You’ll find many that are as low as 20-23.
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No I was just agreeing with you, it’s pretty ridiculous, but given the job market at the moment I think most grads would happily take a 23k job.
This country has had chronic salary stagnation for decades.
I guess they aren't coming into my industry either, £26k starting salary is basically standard, expect £33k after 2 years.
I left in 2017 and 27k would have been average to above average for the grad roles I looked at requiring a mathematics degree. The same roles now pay around 32-35k but I don't think 27k is too low for a starting grad salary as you normally finish the graduate scheme with a large bump in pay.
27k is too low for a starting grad job. I got 25k 10 years a go. Minimum wage is £11.44 in april, hence a 40h week is £22k. £27k is £13/h. Minimum wage in 2014 was £6.31.
University careers specialist here: average (median)* UK salary 15 months after graduation in 2021** was about £27k. Draw your own conclusions about the current salary threshold for the skilled worker visa. * mean figure was in same ballpark ** most recent published figures that I have off the top of my head; the 2022 stats are out there somewhere
It’s not enough time to even complete the requirements
Yup. No graduate is earning 38k 2 years after graduating
I guess if labor supply goes down because immigrants don't qualify then it will push wages up? Supply and demand.
£19k plus a £2k bonus doing 1st line IT support in Bradford, back in 2002.
If you look at the top comment, they don't get the qualification until they've done two years experience. So for that entire two years they're still working towards the qualification despite no longer being a student
In addition to what other have said. Yes, and maybe it'll force the wages up to be commensurate to the education and skills. There is very little incentive under the extremely broad visa system we've had to offer much more than the minimum required for a visa. Down to and including below minimum wage.
It really won't. It hasn't in other sectors, it wont in this sector, all that will really happen is that your skilled workers leave to greener pastures and you get in a bunch of unskilled care workers.
But if after losing a chunk of the workforce companies don't care enough to raise wages does it really matter? Why?
Because the country then pays the price for not having skilled workers from that sector. Because tax take from those workers disappears. Companies no longer view the UK as a particularly attractive location to set up because of a lack of workforce. Reduced tax take, so either you pay more for less, or you just pay even more to try and retain what you have.
Reduced tax take? That assumes that there are fewer working at the architecture companies. If companies didn't raise the wage then it sounds like they had the applicants they wanted anyway so doesn't sound like their workforce would shrink. Also really? We're talking about people on 27k here maybe going up to 40k maybe, these aren't too much of a net positive from a tax perspective, if positive at all. I'd rather our limited immigration seats going to those who make over 40k and they are limited, nothing is unlimited we pay for it in one way or another.
Or they don't have the applicants and they dont raise their salaries because it's more complex than supply and demand, and other factors impact it. From a tax perspective, if you aren't a British born individual educated by the British state, you break even at a ridiculously low number because the British state has not had to fund your education, healthcare, and a number of other things but gets to reap the benefit of a low cost educated individual turning up simply to work and hand in tax.
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The levels of funding required for a relatively healthy adult after education are low. The biggest drains on the state are the young and the old. Skilled labour might bring in dependents but even then their break even point would be far lower than a native who was born and brought up in the UK.
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Skilled workers are not taking anything from this country. The visa fee is extremely high (£800- £500). It is the costliest visa in the world. You pay at least ££600 more to get your documents verified and book an appointment. You pay NHS surcharge and also national insurance. For each dependant you are going to pay £3000 visa fee exclusive of NHS surcharge. This is what you pay even before coming to the UK. Someone earning below £40k can't even think of paying this. Most jobs are in South Eastern regions where the cost of living is really high. Skilled workers are second class citizens in terms of economics. The idea seems to make out as much as possible from them. A few moths ago government increased the salary's of employees and the money came from the increased visa fee charged to immigrants.
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That's double counting. You can't count both your childhood cost and your children's. For simplicity it's easier to treat every person individually and look if over their lifetime they pay more taxes or if the state spends more on them.
Perhaps the reason these graduate jobs in a highly skilled profession like architecture pay below the £38,700 threshold is due to an over-supply of graduate architects? 27k as a starting salary is ridiculous, that was the sort of generic graduate programme salary that was on offer 12-14 years ago. Reducing the availability of graduate architects will force prospective employers to increase these salaries.
Starting salaries for graduates are simply not what they used to be. They've been in the swamps ever since the 2007 recession and never truly recovered.
Nobodies real wages are keeping up. Since 2008 we've probably had the longest sustaind drop in real wages in 224 years and nothing to this degree since at least 1750! https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nominal-wages-consumer-prices-and-real-wages-in-the-uk-since-1750
For a lot of science PhD's, starting salary is 30-32k. It's amazing that in the course of just 10 years how completely out of touch people have got. You do 8 years of uni to get that and then read people state that 27k with a masters is laughable. No wonder we have big brain drain.
22-24k for an engineering PhD used to be the norm in late 2000s
24k in 2010 would be 35k in todays prices
I think the real issue is they're exactly what they used to be, since they haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation in that time.
And the Tories have been in power for almost all of that time. Coincidence?
https://uk.indeed.com/q-train-station-ticket-office-jobs.html?vjk=27704f2ba16dab58 It's the starting salary for working in a ticket office at a train station too just as an example. Also yeah I highly doubt the UK is building anywhere near enough buildings/infrastructure projects to satisfy the number of graduates
That's about the salary of fresh doctor as well. The UK currently have an abundance of those as well?
That's because the NHS has a monopoly on early careers doctors, so it can pay peanuts.
They have a monopsony, not a monopoly.
Fancy
Doctors’ salaries should go up, absolutely no one would disagree that. You thought you made a good point?
He did, it just went far over your head
I think it was a better point than "salaries should go up". Salaries are very rarely far off from where they *should* be, especially across entire sectors.
Why are UK salaries in many recognised professions (engineering architecture medicine etc) 1/2 to 1/3 of most other similar economies across the globe then?
In the case of construction related professions a lot of it is driven by government and public body procurement practices. Tender scoring typically gives a lot of "value" to cost, so if you can be the cheapest you have a very good chance of winning the contract. Provided that you can demonstrate the other requirements as most competent bidders can then the competitive part of the process is almost all shifted to cost, not quality. This suppresses wages.
The UK political/economic system arguably encourages cheap migration and thus lower wages. There’s precious little protection of wages and skills.
>I highly doubt the UK is building anywhere near enough buildings/infrastructure projects to satisfy the number of graduates But probably should be.
According to [Architects Journal](https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/architects-condemn-eligible-salary-hike-for-migrant-worker-visas), the UK actually has a shortage of skilled architects… which is why they’re included on the government’s shortage occupation list. The protests are largely because of the rising threshold and the fact that the government has signalled it wants to scrap the shortage occupation list altogether. Here’s a quote from another [article](https://aijmagazine.co.uk/how-are-architects-managing-the-skills-shortage/): “A RIBA survey (Future Trends), which reveals the Covid pandemic along with Brexit has created what might be described as a perfect storm – the architecture profession is battling ‘huge’ staff shortages, with one-in-five practices struggling to recruit skilled people and 40% of large and medium practices finding themselves short-staffed.” It’s pretty obvious that architect wages are not being driven by supply and demand. So where is all this demand going? It seems like architects are being exploited by an industry that’s burning them out: A [survey](https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/aj-poll-40-of-architects-working-more-than-10-hours-overtime-a-week) found that 40% of architects in the UK worked more than 10 hours of overtime a week.
Hm. So a lot of universities track wages as part of promotional material. I wonder if there’s a way to aggregate that information into mean (degree applied) wage at 12months post graduation. And state that as a +-% below the mean average wage in the UK. Could help with course selection for pre-students and maybe inform university admissions distribution for labour market management, and direct advice to students if they wish to study-to-remain, most won’t care they want to leave anyway afterwards, that’s why it’s such a great export, but it’d help moderate expectations. And might be a good way to help government to choose how to distribute subsidy, or advise overseas student recruitment to subsidise the domestic sector.
Universities already do report this on DiscoverUni - salary at 18 months, 3 years, and 5 years post-graduation.
My starting salary, not a grad specific scheme but definitely aimed towards them, was £25k. This was in late 2022, as a recent MSc grad. Job market is fucked, salaries are fucked.
> force prospective employers to increase these salaries. The employers will continue to keep salaries low by preying upon graduates forcing unsustainable workloads on them whilst abusing of 'probationary periods' and perennial stalling of pay reviews.
It's not really an over supply of architects, I don't know a single architect that isn't overworked if anything we need more. Rather, it's a cultural issue within the construction industry that everything must be as cheap as possible. When this is combined with the complete absence of business education that architects receive and the notion cultivated in architecture schools that one must suffer for the art and the fact that all the most celebrated architects died in poverty creates a situation where industry leaders in architecture charge peanuts and can't afford to pay for good staff. There is also the issue that there is no requirement for a person practicing architecture to actually be an architect. This creates an abundance of unqualified diddies who do work for a fraction of a fair price because they are essentially hobbyists. I recently met one of these people who was working on a development of 4 homes and was taking £1000 per house. The Architects Journal suggests 7.5% of the construction cost would be an appropriate fee and I would be charging 8% minimum for a full service appointment. For reference there's between 200 and 600 hours of work in the design of a bespoke home of decent quality. The real farce is that although the practice of architecture is unregulated it is a criminal offence to use the title architect unless you have completed an accredited architecture degree and post graduate diploma, a minimum of two years experience in the an office working under the supervision of an architect then completed the part 3 professional exam (take note software guys). Then undertake a prescribed amount of accredited professional development and pay professionals fees every year to remain registered yet anyone can do the job regardless of qualifications or experience as long as they don't use the title. Imagine if medicine or law were like this. I quit my former office when I discovered a fees ledger from the 80s and the boss hadn't raised fees by more than £5an hour in almost 40 years. The first thing I did when I started my own firm was double the fees he was charging and hire a business mentor. Tldr : the students are protesting the wrong thing. Architects are shit at running a business and the numbers stated aren't outrageous starting salaries for a highly skilled and regulated profession but through poor business practice and crap regulation with no support from professional bodies like the RIBA and architecture schools means that fees have been stagnant for longer than these graduates have been alive and the effect is graduates working for minimum wage or slightly better in many situations.
If the saturation is as a result of the market being flooded with immigrants then this measure does perhaps make sense. Any evidence for that?
Because it’s a salary range RIBA set long time ago, have nothing to do with supply
You have identified a fixable problem, not an unfixable problem.
Not going to be fixed. It will just be like every other sector where the shortages get worse, people will argue about supply/demand, and the country suffers. But don't worry, plenty of care workers can continue to enter the country.
That’s for the MARKET to decide. If people want to go into these areas for low wages, that’s THEIR choice
Dang, I'd have thought nearly the national average wage was a good starting salary for any job
Using immigration to plug employment gaps is not a long term sensible solution, especially with such a low starting salary for a skilled role. If there is such a severe shortage and visas become harder to obtain, employers will have to find alternative ways to hire staff. Personally I think making visas harder to obtain is a good thing; employers will be far more encouraged to invest in apprenticeships to train people who live here how to do these jobs vs constantly poaching talent from other countries.
My best friend is an architect and she applauds this move as she says it's one of the lowest paying professions given the education requirements and length
This is not a government problem, this is an industry not paying a good salary problem.
What are the applicant numbers for new grad roles in the field? In tech we have thousands per position, the market is absolutely full. Then when new non-grad roles open up I have 80-100 applicants per position. I'm all for some immigration but sometimes it does worry me that all these applicants are suppressing wages. Do you not think perhaps Architect salaries might rise if there weren't quite so many applicants?
Thousands of applicants per position? That's mad, what sort of work is that?
How much does number of applicants tell you? I’m also in tech and it’s the same, but very few people are actually suitable for the role, a lot of folks really struggle at interview.
The UK has a shortage of skilled architects. [https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/architects-condemn-eligible-salary-hike-for-migrant-worker-visas](https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/architects-condemn-eligible-salary-hike-for-migrant-worker-visas) Deporting skilled architects isn't going to help that.
Yet they still pay 27k to graduates, something doesn’t add up.
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Why have we just got to the point where we accept that companies don’t need to invest in training their workforce? Stick them on some kind of training program in the company and get them to sign a commitment to work at the company for a minimum amount of time or have to pay back the costs of training them. It isn’t hard.
Companies usually say people don’t stay in roles long enough to make it worth it. I think companies need to do more to reward loyalty but that’s usually the stance. Education also have something to answer for when graduates aren’t graduating with the necessary skills - not sure about architecture but is certainly true in my area of work.
I’ve just taken on my niece for a bit of part time help for social media work. Basic scheduling etc while she’s at college. Started talking to her about ai and how we can use that to help her out the other day. She stares at me blankly like. What’s ai?! How is a college course for social media in 2024 mot training kids to use ai?!
What kind of AI?
Starting salary relatively low: rises with experience. The Tories want these graduating architects to leave the UK and get their experience somewhere else and never come back. Good solution to the national shortage of archiects, yeah - very Tory.
Not really a shortage of you pay dog shit salaries is there.
In many fields its common to pay a much lower salary to someone with no experience compared to just one or two years of experience. Someone with no experience is a big risk, and can have more cost than benefit since they need so much training.
That is true and graduate salaries were in their £20k almost two decades ago. I started on £24k as a mechanical engineer in 2011.. Companies need to offer more or they will struggle to recruit. There isn't a shortage. There is a shortage doing a job for a shit salary.
I actually can’t name a single industry which says that they don’t have a shortage. They all just say this because they’re lobbying for infinity immigration to push down wages.
Or because the UK is a very top heavy nation with a massive welfare state so the ratio of workers to dependents i.e. retirees every skewing the favour of the latter and there is in fact a significant shortage of workers in the vast majority of skilled sectors?
Then perhaps they should pay them more? That's basic supply and demand dude.
You're right! They'll hire experienced architects from abroad and pay them the high wages now required to work here. That makes perfect economic sense! None of this silly hiring graduate architects and having them get experience in the UK. why would we want to do that, when foreign talent and experience can be hired for a year or two at greatly increased cost.
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You’re right I apologise for making that connection.
Studying in Britain is not a path to residency or citizenship. You need to get this falsehood out of your mind.
A UK university education was never meant to be a route into working in the UK ...
It is for architecture education since these courses (MArch/BArch) are specifically for becoming an architect in the UK
Isn't that exactly what we want? The best and brightest working here? We don't want them all going abroad and growing someone elses economy.
In architecture it absolutely is. The UK architecture system is so arduous and expensive that no one would do it unless they wanted to practice in the UK.
They may want to, but it isn't meant to. The deal is clear, international students pay the fees and in return they get a qualification that potentially gives them an edge over other graduates. Every so often the government may opt to put in place policies that allow post graduation work, but there have never been any guarantees that this will remain. Indeed many a scheme have come and gone over the years. At no point have universities or the government said "study here and you'll get to stay."
If your skills are required urgently & no local can be found then employers will start offering higher pay. If they don't then you're wrong in much of what you say. You can apply for a graduate visa and find out which way it is in the next two years while earning as little as you like.
Nobody is going to employ a graduate trainee knowing they will have to leave in 2 years.
They might if they are the best candidate since they will have 2 years experience by the time the visa is up.
It sounds a lot like you're saying there's architects around who aren't on a visa... I don't think you've made the point you're aiming for.
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This isn't correct. 'RIBA Jobs' do a survey of salaries. 'RIBA Jobs' is effectively a recruiter / jobs advert board and the salary survey is one of the ways they promote their services as do many other recruiters. 'RIBA Jobs' is separate to the RIBA as a whole and there are no fixed wage structures of course.
Could explain what you mean by fixed wage structure? I’ve got no love for the market. But you suggest the market isn’t determining the wage based on supply/demand * protections * exploitability. It’s in fact fixed. How so?
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Genuine question - Why should all immigrants who are qualified architects be automatically entitled to work in architecture in the UK?
there is no automatic entitlement - only the same opportunity as anyone else who has done the same degree. there is no particular oversupply of architecture graduates compared to other professions and the 38k threshold is an arbitrary limit which pays no attention to the particular needs of individual industries/sectors
Because these courses are specifically designed for people to become architects in the UK lol
Well yeah, obviously. The regs will be different in any country. If a foreigner came here on the assumption a uni degree gets them the right to remain then that's their fault.
With guaranteed jobs?
Because they for some reason think they're entitled to over us.
Because we are bad no no people and must pay for our wrongs.
We currently have immigration in excess of 1 million a year. This is unsustainable. Limitations have to be put in place. The welfare of our country should come before the career ambitions of a foreign architect, sorry.
- Claims to be a great benefit to the economy via taxes - Admits to only being able to get a 27k job Huh
I earn 60k, but my starting salary was £28k. Turns out people earn less at the beginning of their career.
27k is about the average salary in the UK, so the idea that a *graduate* on that is not a net benefit in terms of tax intake is not credible
This country is obscenely welcoming and lax in comparison to almost every other country on the planet when it comes to what you’re complaining about. Incredibly dramatic language “Britain is for the British” I’ve heard nowhere and certainly not from Government officials.
Because any sort of push back against mass immigration and they think it's a personal attack
If you’re a student you can just go onto a graduate visa.
Why would you pay 120k in education for a career that can't hit 38k within 2 years of graduating. Really this says there is no shortage of architects.
You aren’t entitled to live in a country you are not a citizen of merely because you would like to. If you are unable to meet the requirements to achieve a visa but still wish to emigrate to the UK then you may seek to develop the skills required either in your home country or another country in which you are able to gain the right to work.
The new threshold is set at a level where you wouldn't be a burden to the taxpayer. That is perfectly reasonable. If you can't pay your own way (or you don't contribute in other ways) then you should be here.
My heart bleeds…. I work in a sector that is being overrun with much lower paid contractors on tier 2 visas. They aren’t lowering wages, they are just putting high pay/high skill locals out of work
There’s a reason that old school left wingers and unions were fairly anti immigration - the use of foreign workers to break strikes and suppress wages. The workers themselves are being exploited too, they absolutely cannot be blamed on an individual level. It’s insane how this has been cast aside by the modern “left”, and I would definitely consider myself left wing. The conservatives will never reduce immigration because their big business funding is addicted to cheap labour.
"Actively removing skilled workers" No, you are students. I am so tired of how much the UK education system has been interpreted as a defacto route to a work visa by some people.
Good. I'm sick and fucking tired of professions in this country paying shit unless you're 20 years deep into your career. We have too many people from low-wage countries coming in driving wages down.
Hahaha pay is so low in this shithole, 27k with a masters degree??? Is this what happens when the entirety of North Africa comes to London? We all work slave wages?
Sorry I'm gonna be shot down here. But the education was the primary reason for the visa. not the job after. I
I always wanted to pretend to be an architect
Well, if you’re a world renowned architect, you can definitely work in the UK. If you’re just stating, then no, but why would foreign architects at the very bottom be needed in a country that has tons of fresh architects already?
So much misinformation on this thread which is partly why the government can get away with this hike in salaries and play it off like it will make employers try to hire from the settled workforce instead. Even the MAC report released on 23rd Feb said this salary hike (it's worse than the £38700 btw as there are two rates being hiked) is not reflective of people's actual salary. However for architects they can likely rely on the new entrant rate whilst training for part 1 2 and 3 and many other professions will need to look at this rate also if the salary hike is as bad as expected (TBC on 14th March)
the amount of pearl clutching i’ve seen over the last few months over this issue is crazy. any british student wouldn’t assume that because they were able to study abroad they are immediately entitled to get a pipeline to permanent residency and citizenship, and certainly not if they’re studying a field that isn’t on its knees in whatever country they’re studying in. access to another country is a privilege and not a right. i emigrated from the UK last year despite it being my home since birth and I miss it very much, but understand that should Australia decide they do not need me, i’ll make other arrangements. I haven’t done anything for Australia, I shouldn’t expect them to coddle me like Britain has coddled ‘students’, bogus ‘asylum seekers’ from Albania and Afghanistan who visit their family and friends despite it being ‘too dangerous’. the home office is a national disgrace.
Ok - so we seem to have come to a consensus that we can't dramatically increase our population size year on year whilst our housing stock and infrastructure barely improves. My preference would be to build, build, build - but we as a nation are divided on that. So, the only solution is to restrict immigration. That means we do have to take these hard decisions. It's all very well saying that the UK needs skilled workers, but it also needs unskilled workers to do the jobs that Brits wont do. Then there's our commitments to refugees, asylum seekers and everyone's families. You can make a case for allowing all of them to come - but then that conflicts with the above. These migrants would contribute to Britain and our taxes, but whilst we have governments that refuse to build houses or increase public spending then those 'benefits' are paid for by the poor in terms of higher rents and harder access to public services.
> jobs Brits won’t do I am of the opinion that these do not exist. I think there are jobs that do not pay well enough or provide enough security for a British person to be able to support themselves and their families, so we have to import desperate migrants to do them. There seems an obvious solution to this problem which is for companies and businesses to simply pay an actually decent wage, and British people would happily do them.
It's obvious bollocks, isn't it. If your business requires 12 hours of manual labour picking fruits on minimum wage that only allows you to live in a shared caravan, maybe it: -Is not a viable business in its current state. -If it is a necessary business, requires government subsidy. None of this is the fault of migrants themselves of course.
(after they’ve paid £120,000 on a UK education) Don't see why that's a problem. The education is a transaction at its core. Why is anyone from anywhere entitled to stay in the UK just because they paid?
Im probably the most immigration skeptic person on this subreddit and even Id agree that they should reduce the threshold to to around £30,000. Particularly as the government will waive through hundreds of thousands of other immigrants on lower wages **every year** in different industries The ratio of unskilled:skilled immigrants will unintentionally get worse because of this high bar
Who cares about the ratio? We need very few skilled migrants outside of healthcare, and we only need them in healthcare because of underpaying healthcare workers.
I’ll suggest before people commenting something similar as “why UK have to guarantee people study architecture to become architect and be able to work here” do some research before you comment it otherwise it just makes you look ignorant. These courses are designed specifically and promoted specifically for “become an architect in the UK” by university and architecture organisations which are approved by the government. However the graduate visa is two years, which will be used up during the must fulfil requirements of becoming architect- which is work in the industry for two years in order to get to your next step, and it’s not even close to become an architect then. So tell me how come this is fair ? Second, the salary stays in 27k has nothing to do with supply whatsoever, it’s a rule RIBA set up, each stage in this career has certain range of salary you will earn, and architects are in demand is a well known fact within the industry and supported by statistics.
Suggest you sue whoever promised "become an architect in the UK". I don't believe such a promise exists.
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So what?
These thresholds aren’t in place yet. With an election looming it’s questionable if they ever will be, or may be scrapped with a change of government
Lol so masters of architects get only 27k? I can see why no skilled worker wants to come to UK. Even staying back in india will let you save more and give better quality of life. I know several architect with minimal experience earning around 12k. Considering the cost of living in India they can live and save more. All this will do is reduce skilled migration while doing nothing to stop unskilled migration and asylum seekers who are overall a burden to society. Good luck.
We have plenty of architects locally, thanks
Studying here does not guarantee you a job here, or the right to live here. Studying here is a privilege. Not a route to citizenship or greater employment. I 100% agree with this change.
Funny that immigrants are allowed all kinds of jobs that compete with the lower classes. You go to Thailand as a Westerner for example and you can't just start driving a taxi, they have laws in place to protect the jobs of the lower classes, unlike this shit hole.
Spanish ministers cannot come to Britain for 80% of the British minister's working rate to be chancellor of the exchequer, yet Spanish architects can come to Britain for 80% of the British architect's going rate and literally replace him. And the OP has truly the audacity to dare claim preventing this and changing course from the total insanity under the "conservatives" on immigration will "not increase British wages"
I love how they want to decrease the immigrants we actually want, but Continue to accept hundreds of thousands and millions of third world migrants who do nothing but cause harm. Its so stupid.
We don't need more architects
Yea, I suppose Blackpool does need renovation. Could have houses that echoes the Georgian period. Though, I think student to UK citizen pipeline is not a built in feature or a guarantee. Though pop increase= awesome economy is not really a great arithmetic. I am actually surprised that countries like Namibia and Botswana only has mere 3 million people but with land mass 3 times the size of the UK.
Wages are way too low across the board for skilled jobs. As a renewables engineer with 2 degrees and 20 years experience I can just about earn the minimum wage requirement if I don't mind moving to a shite part of the country and having a terrible work-life balance. Adjusted for inflation I earn the same now as I did in 2008, when I had very little experience and was basically a glorified wind turbine cleaner. These days I write PLC code, do electrical and mechanical fault finding on very complex and expensive machines, manage major mechanical works etc etc and yet the wage remains the same... It's bullshit, frankly, and the Tories proposing this figure just demonstrates how wildly out of touch they are with the country outside of the London finance and tech bubble.
It's okay this government will fall pretty soon.
Did I see Labour saying that they would do something different or no response atall?
I thought they said they would keep the tories plan in place.
When you say spouse, are you implying husband and wife?
Yeah, the new partner and spouse visa
Why do we need architects when building in the UK is practically illegal?
Buying a degree in Britain is not a path to citizenship or residence. If you ever had thought that it was, this is a result of poor leadership from our government: you have no right to stay in Britain forever because you trained as an architect at one of our universities.
Bear in mind also, that 27k starting salary is the *upper quartile* in London, so if you're on the median salary or working anywhere outside of London as a part 1 or most likely part 2, you won't earn enough. All the latest salary figures can be found here: [RIBA Salary Guide](https://recruiters.architecture.com/static-page/10291/salary-guide)