For many talented students at NYU Abu Dhabi, opportunity often seems to be limited to those with “good” passports — originating from a country in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, East Asia or the Gulf Cooperation Council. The international network that some can navigate with ease is beset by a complicated process of visa applications and secondary airport screenings, and opportunities are lost outright because of work sponsorship requirements for others.

Before delving into the United Kingdom’s newest visa scheme and what it means for the NYUAD community, I must acknowledge that my privileges as a U.S. citizen have allowed me this ease of navigation. I am able to apply for a job virtually anywhere in the world, without being affected negatively by my passport. I myself did absolutely nothing to earn these privileges other than being born in the U.S. It was hardly something I thought about before coming to NYUAD.

As someone who didn’t go to an international school and almost stumbled upon this university by chance, access to these global opportunities was very foreign to me. My parents don’t even have working passports at the moment, and I certainly wasn’t going around jet setting the world as a child before I had the resources from NYUAD. However, now that this travel is possible for me, my spring break plans, for example, are never limited by months-long wait times at foreign embassies.

Any equalization effort by a governmental body, whether borne out of self-interest or altruism, is important progress. Despite the fact that the UK is certainly facing its share of problems, from a severe energy crisis to political divisions after Boris Johnson’s resignation, it is still home to a massive global financial center and many multinational firms.

The High Potential Visa Program, as part of Britain’s adoption of a “points-based immigration system”, grants the ability to live and work in the UK for three years without a job offer for those graduating from “world top universities.” This list of universities numbers only 37, and over half of them are located in the United States. Most notably, not a single university on the list is located in Africa, South Asia or Latin America.

NYUAD’s inclusion on the list is almost an accident: a product of our university being constructed as part of the overarching NYU rather than its own entity. There are many accomplished students at our university and at every university on the “high potential” list without a doubt, but the world’s talent pool is far from limited to these select institutions. Are there really no students studying in the entire Indian subcontinent, for example, home to universities such as the IITs and IIMs with sub two percent acceptance rates worthy of the same treatment?

Students from countries in the Global South that do manage to study at these “world top universities” are far from an economically representative pool of even the most talented. Only seven universities in the U.S., several of which are small liberal arts colleges, admit international students without consideration of financial need. A pre-tax income of $77,000 USD, which is below the yearly cost of attendance at top private universities including NYU New York, puts a student in the top one percent of income earners in India. No working-class family in a “developing nation” has the means to put their child through a full-pay education experience abroad, regardless of how talented they are. Rather, these nations are home to the vast majority of people who lack the passport power to easily apply for jobs around the world in the first place and would benefit significantly more from such policies designed to increase equity.

Rather than breaking down barriers to equity, the UK’s new high potential visa program focuses on elitist definitions of prestige in determining the workers it wants to attract to fill its skilled labor shortage because the selection of universities used by the UK government itself is derived from flawed ranking aggregators, which have already been facing a wide variety of criticisms.

So, for those of us at NYUAD who would love to live and work in the UK, and perhaps seek a longer term future there, this program is great news. This reprieve for us, however, should not be mistaken for a fair and equitable effort to attract workers from across the global talent pool. The world remains drastically overdue to reevaluate the elitism inherent in these decisions regarding who is “high potential” and “high performing.”