Like so many other parents, particularly Protestants - who are witnessing a disproportionate brain drain of student children because they fear unionism has no future - he hates the thought of them going to Britain to study and never returning.
For 18-year-old Sameena Kausar, among the harder things to witness is the drain of fellow students in her Koran class and services at the Makki Mosque.
The rise in university tuition fees has dominated headlines and borne the brunt of student anger at the coalition government since 2010, but there is another drain on student finances that has so far escaped scrutiny.
Still, some parents grumble and cite the district's sinking test scores, the financial drain of special education students, now 17percentt of the district total, and a skirmish during Pocono Mountain West's graduation ceremony that left one person stabbed and another in handcuffs.
Basically, in 2007 the Lib Dem council floated the idea of draining students out of the traditional go-to suburbs like leafy, affluent Jesmond and terraced, multicultural Heaton and put them in purpose-built blocks around the city.
Converse spoke from his experience in Ethiopia in the 1980s in a laboratory plagued by brain drain of Ethiopian staff and students.
Feeling drained from "teaching huge numbers of students," she left the university in 1999 to work at consulting company Cantox in Mississauga, Canada, where she learned about regulatory affairs as she helped food-processing companies win approval for new ingredients from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Amid fears that the law's passage is leading to a "brain drain" of academics and will discourage students from applying, Steiner's is a high profile departure tied to the new statute.
Supporting Southern students to go to the North for training has been one option, but there are challenges such as high expenses, possible brain drain, learning non-transferable skills and low numbers of students.
Both Egypt and Qatar battle what Helal referred to as "brain drain;" talented students leaving in search of better education and jobs elsewhere.
