Pity the poor university vice-chancellors who draw a third or a half of their students from overseas. Immigration is now firmly on the political agenda—for all major political parties. And the policy choices made today will reverberate through university admissions for the rest of the decade.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation put the cat among the pigeons in September with a position paper calling for the number of temporary visa holders to be cut by 750,000. That’s out of a temporary population of 2.9 million—including tourists. Tough cuts indeed.
Needless to say, if a One Nation government actually cut the number of student visas issued to 100,000 a year for three years, Australia’s universities would be decimated. Literally. The total student population (not just the international student population) would shrink by more than 10 percent.
But One Nation isn’t just proposing to cut the intake. They’ve proposed to end onshore processing for all student visas. Instead, each visa would be for a specific degree. Further study would require a new visa, and post-study work rights would be eliminated for most students.
These policies would reestablish government control over Net Overseas Migration (NOM) by ensuring that those who enter on student visas actually leave at the end of their studies—and in a pre-defined period of time.
It would also disrupt the model that research-intensive Group of Eight universities have relied on since the beginning of the pandemic: recruiting their own bachelor’s graduates to fill their master’s programs.
More broadly, One Nation’s announced targets would reduce universities’ international student numbers by roughly one-third, from over 30% of all students to around 20%.
Labor responded a few days later with sweeping reforms to the student visa system, focusing more on levers than levels.
For the last two years, Labor has tried (and failed) to manage student visa numbers by imposing caps on new enrolments. The problem was that the caps only applied to new students arriving from overseas. They did little to prevent students already onshore from staying for a second, third, tenth, or twentieth course.
Worse, they allowed students already in Australia to appeal adverse visa decisions to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), where 53,984 onshore student visa refusal cases were awaiting adjudication as of August 31, with an average time to decision of 69 weeks.
Labor’s reforms will clean up this mess without imposing a One Nation style enrolment armageddon. Under policies now implemented, international students will be allowed to stay in Australia only if they are upgrading, for example from a diploma to a bachelor’s, or a bachelor’s to a master’s degree. Most others will have to apply from offshore, and thus will not have standing to appeal if they are turned down.
This change is music to the ears of the major metropolitan public universities—and a death knell to the host of private vocational colleges that line CBD streets in Sydney and Melbourne.
Course-hoppers who want to stay as long as possible on student visas will now have to upgrade from cheap vocational study to expensive university degrees. The biggest beneficiaries will be the financially weaker institutions in Sydney and Melbourne—the cities where most international students want to live.
Cash-strapped Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, and University of Technology Sydney are likely to see a rush of would-be vocational students knocking on their doors. Melbourne’s dual-sector institutions (Victoria University, Swinburne University, and RMIT) could benefit most of all, admitting students into their vocational programs with structured upgrade pathways to university degrees.
Labor’s reforms won’t necessarily bring down NOM, but they will change student behavior—for the better.
Like One Nation, the Coalition proposes requiring that all student visa applications be lodged offshore. And like One Nation’s policies, the Coalition’s would truly establish control over NOM.
The difference is that the Coalition would not impose such extreme reductions in the numbers of international students. Indeed, they don’t propose caps at all. Instead they suggest a target of reducing new commencements by around 15%—a target that could easily be met through policy settings instead of hard caps.
Their most important policy setting is the curtailment of post-study work rights. Echoing One Nation’s plans, the Coalition would transform the temporary graduate visa from an automatic right into a rare privilege.
Contrary to self-interested politicking by the international education lobby, this would not violate international treaty obligations. The Australia-India trade agreement speaks of “opportunities” and “possible stays” of “up to” two, three, or four years. It does not guarantee visas to all who want them.
The Coalition’s plan would hit the weaker universities hard while leaving the Group of Eight largely unscathed. That’s because expensive, research-intensive universities like Sydney, UNSW, Melbourne, and Monash cater to Chinese students, who generally go home after finishing their degrees.
The financially weaker universities rely heavily on Indian students who need income from post-study work to pay off their student loans. Whether they’re really in Australia for study, work, a pathway to permanent residence, or all three, most of them can’t afford to study here without several years of additional income earned after finishing their degrees.
None of these plans has much to offer to the regional universities, which have so far struggled to capitalise on the international student bonanza.
All of them will, however, curb the abuses of the visa system that have allowed metropolitan universities to make hay by (in effect) selling places in Australia. That won’t satisfy the regions, but it will at least do something to level the playing field.
And all recognise (to varying degrees) that the best way to control NOM isn’t to impose caps, but to improve the policies the influence students’ motivations for coming to Australia in the first place. Credit where credit is due: that’s a win. And when it comes to immigration reform, we need all the wins we can get.
Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney.
