OPINION
The Federal Government deserves credit for its recent move to ban commission payments to agents who facilitate onshore student transfers between education providers. It is an important step toward improving the integrity of Australia’s international education sector.
It does this by removing financial incentives for agents and providers poaching students from one institution to another.
However, if we want to ensure that the international students applying to Australian universities are genuine and want to complete their degrees, then more is needed.
The commission ban addresses part of the supply side of this equation: the agents who orchestrated unnecessary transfers and the providers who incentivised them. But so long as international students themselves face no meaningful barrier to switching providers, then the risk of attracting non-genuine students remains.
More is needed to ensure that international students switching provider once they arrive in country only do so where the reasons are genuine.
The solution is straightforward and well-proven: require students to apply for a new visa when they change education providers.
This is not a radical idea. It is standard practice in the United Kingdom, Canada and most recently, New Zealand. Our New Zealand neighbours have gone one step further, announcing last year that from November, students who change their provider or lower their level of study will need to apply for a new visa entirely. The United States has also proposed stricter new measures to curtail unnecessary student transfers. Requiring students to obtain a new visa would limit the circumstances where, for example, a student applies to well-regarded public universities, enjoy the benefit of that university’s international student cap and low visa risk rating, and then — after the six-month transfer restriction period is over — immediately move to low-cost, lower-quality providers.
In these scenarios, the motivation is not to pursue education but rather to stay in Australia to work.
The Government's stated concern is that tying a visa to an institution restricts consumer choice. But this proposed reform does not prevent students from changing providers. It simply requires that they apply for a new visa if they have a genuine reason to do so, pay the associated fee, and demonstrate afresh that they are in Australia to study.
Genuine students with legitimate reasons to transfer — a provider that has failed their expectations, a change in career direction, a documented shift in circumstances — would still have that path available to them. What would be curtailed is the no-questions-asked, frictionless institution-hop that the current system effectively invites.
Non-genuine student arrivals into Australia have been a problem for the sector in recent years. Not only does it inflate net overseas migration figures to the frustration of many in the community, but it is an expensive distraction for international recruitment and compliance teams at universities, who, despite extensive screening of applicants, are unable to prevent what sometimes occurs once students are in Australia.
Annual reports from some Australian universities in recent years point to large international student attrition rates of up to 50% in some cases. This suggests that there is large demand for students to come to Australia but with something other than study as their primary purpose.
Australia's international education industry is a remarkable national asset. But community support for it depends on the public having confidence that the system is not being gamed. Tying the student visa to the enrolled institution would bring Australia into alignment with the rest of the world.
It is also the clearest signal the Government could send that it intends to build an international education sector defined by quality and sustainability, not just volume.
Professor Eric Knight is Deputy Vice Chancellor (People & Operations) at Macquarie University