Sanctions drive Iranian students away from US, UK and towards Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines

Top US and British universities are losing favour with ambitious young Iranians as Washington’s increasingly hostile ties with Tehran push them towards Asia

Nearly one in three people in highly literate Iran wish to leave the country in search of better opportunities

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Melodie Karbassian, an Iranian undergraduate at the University of Hong Kong. Photo: Supplied

Published: 10:30am, 15 Jun 2019Updated: 2:54pm, 15 Jun 2019

As a high school student in Iran during the early 2000s, Ali Asghar Heidari would read about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in science magazines and dream about one day studying at the storied US institution.

But when it came time for Heidari, 29, to dive into research in his chosen field of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, he soon found studying in the United States as an Iranian would be no easy task.

In the US, Heidari would have faced exorbitant tuition fees and living costs stemming from a tumbling Iranian rial and restrictions on financial transactions with his homeland – consequences of the Trump administration’s reimposition of sanctions on Tehran following its exit from the Iran nuclear deal. That is assuming he would have been able to get a student visa in the first place.

Although students were officially exempted from Trump’s travel ban on citizens of seven countries including Iran, issuances of student visas to Iranians have slowed as tensions have ratcheted up between Washington and Tehran. In 2017, just 2,201 Iranians were granted student visas, compared with 2,650 in 2016 and 3,241 in 2015, according to State Department data.

Ultimately, Heidari decided to look East, taking up a research intern position at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) school of computing earlier this year.

“NUS has lots of first-class researchers and professors,” said Heidari. “They provide lots of facilities for students and the atmosphere is really happy and multicultural and productive.”

The National University of Singapore is an attractive option for many Iranians. Photo: Facebook

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