There was no warning at the Senate committee hearing on capping international student numbers last week that it would cause a plague outbreak among Vice-Chancellors.
But other than that, the warnings were dire, with nobody talking much about the detail of actual impact. Fortunately Peter Hurley, Ha Nguyen and colleagues at Victoria U are here to help.
The VU team starts by pointing out that caps are a means to set a ceiling on numbers and reduce growth, rather than slash numbers now. And they argue, it is not what the government wants, but the way it is done that will get results.
VU propose foundations for caps including,
- Supporting the overall market by focusing on the institutions that deliver the most benefits to economy and community
- Protecting international students by minimising the impact of policy change
- Prioritising institutions with significant domestic student enrolments to ensure that Australia’s tertiary education system is receiving the most value from international education.
They also suggest setting international numbers by establishing a base number for all institutions, say 500 – only the 20 per cent or so with more would be subject to caps. The allocation for those with more could be flexibly based on a ratio, two locals for every international, five to one, or one to one, all depending on circumstances and criteria – such as available housing. There is no mention of a market, but the VU team suggests that private VET colleges with no domestic students would lose numbers, which could be reallocated. They estimate this could mean moving 60,000 places to institutions with a higher proportion of domestic students.
The VU team also propose aligning student work rights to being enrolled at an institution that meets government criteria.
“Such a change would leave most, if not all, international students with access to the Australian labour market. But it would create an important lever for the Australian government to use if it needed to cap the number of students in labour market, or minimise the likelihood of visa abuse,” they suggest.
While the VU team is silent on the subject, this would be a politically easy sell for the government, which private VET providers would hate but universities with lower international shares love.
But who would do the work? Sounds like a job for ATEC and (shudder) ASQA.
