Education Minister Jason Clare says a majority of students at Australian universities should be Australians.
Sounds straightforward – but it isn’t. On the one hand there are universities with thousands of students on campuses overseas. On the other, internationals can make up majorities in some classes of courses.
“It should be more than 50% of students at universities being local students. It's one of the reasons why we didn't allocate more international student numbers to Sydney University,” he told Sky News after the 2026 international quotas were announced.
There is a reason the Minister mentioned Uni Sydney; internationals are 51 % of its total enrolments and official figures for 2024 show they are (bar 0.4 %) where the name says they are. Mr Clare could also have mentioned neighbouring UNSW, whose 38,000 internationals, 47% of its total, are in the Premier State. And Uni Melbourne, which has 32,000 internationals (43 %), just about all on-shore.
But RMIT must be exempt from the Minister’s ire. Certainly 50% of its total enrolments are internationals but they only make up a quarter of people on the Melbourne campus, the other 25% are at RMIT offshore; generally on its Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh campuses.
It is the same for other international-heavy universities that have invested time and money in really exporting education. Just under half Uni Wollongong’s enrolments are internationals, but of them, more than half are UoW overseas. James Cook U has more international enrolments off-shore than on.
Murdoch U might alarm the Minister – just 10,000 of its 24,000 total enrolments are by Australian citizens and they barely outnumber the 8,000 internationals in WA. But what pushes Murdoch to being a 57 % international university are the 5,000 students in its offshore campuses.
But this does not mean universities are not dependent on internationals to keep some categories of courses afloat. A new analysis by Frank Larkins (Uni Melbourne) of university-wide enrolments by course, demonstrates the dependence, HERE
In particular, international students account for over half the PG coursework market at 19 of the 40 universities he reviewed. Across all campuses, Murdoch U has the lowest local share with a domestic enrolment of just 12 %, followed by ANU (24 %) Uni Sydney (30 %), Uni Queensland (32 %), CQU (36 %) and Victoria and Charles Darwin U (both 39 %).
Professor Larkins also suggests that Mr Clare’s focus on balanced enrolments should include to source countries for internationals, with China (28.3 %) and India (15.2 %) accounting for nearly half.
“The sector will need to wait for more details from the Minister to assess the real impact of his announcement on enrolment profiles,” Professor Larkins suggests.