The Coalition are eyeing serious cuts to international student numbers onshore as they seek to cut annual net migration numbers to 200,000 or fewer.
Comments from National Party leader Matt Canavan and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor in the wake of the Opposition’s Budget Response speech last week made it clear that international student numbers would face a significant cut if the Coalition came to power.
Mr Canavan told the ABC on Friday that there should definitely be a reduction in international student numbers.
“It’s a total scam at the moment, it’s just ridiculous,” Mr Canavan said.
“I speak to so many young people and they go to lecture theatres and way over half, I’ve heard 70 to 80% are from overseas.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have foreign students, we’ve always done that, but the principal role of an Australian university should be to teach Australian students.”
“Let’s be serious here, a lot of the pipeline of foreign students coming to this country and are not really coming here to study, it’s becoming a conduit to citizenship.”
He said he had seen education agents selling courses as a pathway to citizenship first hand on a visit to Calcutta a couple of years ago, and that the student visa system had become a scam.
His message to Australian universities was, “You get a lot of government funding, it should be focused on Australia first.” He made no mention of the VET sector.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor also foreshadowed a student visa cut, promising he would look more closely at international students – with a new policy position widely expected to be adopted later this year, in an attempt to stem voter leakage to One Nation.
Emerging briefly from the Parkville bunker, Glyn Davis (yes, he who formerly held the PM’s ear as head of Prime Minister and Cabinet 2022-25 and clearly has a few insights into policy trajectories ) and Michael Wesley from Melbourne U have penned a piece to suggest that we may have passed peak International education and warning that as parties screw down the number of international enrolments, there will be significant consequences for domestic students.
It’s worth a read for what it says – and what it doesn’t. It trots out the same arguments the sector has prosecuted in various forms for years in an eloquent fashion (international students cross subsidise the locals, and they deliver an economic benefit to the community) doesn’t spend time trying to make a non-financial case (beyond alluding to the value of soft power) and ultimately doesn’t put a price tag on the value of cutting down enrolments (apart from noting that many domestic students might have to pay up to 90% fees, like the worst of JRG costings, applied to all discipliens). It doesn’t delve into the uneven impact that visa restrictions have already had on the sector, with regional universities hit hard, while institutions like UoM fill their allocated visa entitlement relatively easily.
The piece does note that there will be less capability to address disadvantage and equity of Access as proposed by the Accord, casting yet more doubt on whether the elaborate ATEC mechanism will be capable of guiding universities towards sustainable outcomes – or whether the Accord’s goals will be remotely possible.
“Are political parties, students and parents ready for the cost of a tertiary system more dependent on our own resources?” Professors Davis and Wesley ask.
“Will the promises to make further education available to an even wider cohort survive an ugly encounter with fiscal reality? Now, before we hit a crisis, is the time for a candid discussion about how this nation supports its public universities.”
This last point is particularly significant – many institutions have already experienced some form of crisis from the move away from international ed, but in an international context, others have had it worse as a result of more savage cuts. Far deeper cuts mirroring experience in Canada, the US and UK would have a far bigger impact.