Category: International students

Are the government’s policies working to reduce international student numbers? Part 1, student demand

Andrew Norton3 Comments

From late 2023 to July 2024 the federal government implemented at least nine policies to reduce international student numbers. With full 2024 student visa data released late last week this is a good time to assess how well (or how badly, depending on your point of view) these policies are going.

This post looks at the demand side, how many student visa applications have been lodged. A subsequent post will look at the supply side, visas granted.

The main findings are that the government’s policies have worked to substantially reduce demand for vocational education overall and from migration-sensitive countries in higher education, such as India and Pakistan. However 2024 Chinese higher education applications were down only slightly on 2023 and remain up on 2019. The impact on other traditional higher education source countries such as Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong was also muted (all slightly up or down).

Overall demand

As can be seen in the chart below, in 2024 the Department of Home Affairs received 429,691 student visa applications. This was down 20% on 2023, but still above 2019, the last full year before COVID migration restrictions distorted supply and demand.

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Mapping Australian higher education 2023 – October 2024 data update

Andrew Norton1 Comment

Update 20/12/2025: More recent data here.

An updated version of Mapping Australian higher education is not on the horizon, but to extend the life of the 2023 version I have updated the data behind the charts and some tables. An Excel file with these and the two further updates mentioned below is here.

Further update 6/11/2024: The 2023 Student Experience Survey results have been released. Some question changes have broken the time series but the replacement question results are recorded.

Further update 12/11/2024: A careful reader has identified the missing higher education provider mentioned below and identified other errors in my institutes of higher education appendix. Hopefully the list is now correct and complete. This update also includes 2024 bachelor and above attainment data.

The original pdf with explanatory text is here.

Some noteworthy changes since its publication:

  • We now know that domestic enrolments fell in both 2022 and 2023; enrolments last declined in 2004 (figure 3)
  • International students – although no regular reader of this blog needs this pointed out – recovered strongly from the COVID period (figure 10)
  • The source country skew of international students means that a top 15 source country does not necessarily send a lot of students, but for the first time an African country made it to the list, Kenya with 6,538 students in 2023 (figure 11) (and 7,330 onshore YTD July in 2024).
  • Higher education student income support recipient numbers continued to fall, to 156,710 in mid-2023, the lowest figure since 2009 (figure 18). While since 2022 falling income support recipients is partly due to fewer students, except for a COVID spike the number has been in structural decline since 2017.
  • Staff numbers recovered strongly in 2023 to be roughly what they were in March 2020 (figure 19)
  • HELP repayments increased increased significantly, from $5.56 billion in respect of 2021-22 to $7.8 billion in respect of 2022-23 (figure 31B). Most of this was due to voluntary repayments increasing from $780 million to $2.9 billion, as debtors sought to evade high indexation (some of which will be refunded if the indexation reduction bill passes).
  • Short-term graduate full-time employment rates improved, in 2023 reaching the best level since 2009 (figure 40)
  • The number of higher education providers continued to increase, from 198 in mid-2023 to 211 in October 2024 (appendix A and appendix B).

The Department of Education’s failure to release the 2023 Finance or Student Experience Survey publications means that the update is not as full as I would like.

Visa processing and international student policy

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Some universities and vocational education providers would prefer enrolment caps to ministerial direction 107, which consigned their offshore student visa applications to the end of the visa processing queue. 107 tells the Department of Home Affairs to give processing priority to applications for schools, postgraduate research, and higher education institutions with a low immigration risk rating.

The education minister has said that ministerial direction 107 will go if the caps bill passes.

While 107 should be repealed, as it unfairly penalises some student visa applicants and education providers, like Claire Field I think the sector over-rates the benefits that would follow. 107 is blamed for other things that happened around the same time that would not be affected if it went.

These other things include the resources Home Affairs allocates to student visa processing, changed practices in applying visa eligibility criteria, and new visa rules.

Student visa processing levels

From November 2022 to July 2023, Home Affairs put significant effort into clearing a student visa backlog. On my calculations, in those nine months they processed – counting both grants and rejections – 483,199 visa applications (primary visa holders only). That is 54% more than the equivalent number pre-COVID, between 2018 and 2019.

In the second half of 2023, shown in green in the chart below, monthly visa processing dropped back to levels that were similar to 2019. Ministerial direction 107 was announced in December 2023, but that was the fourth month of more normal pre-COVID visa processing volumes.

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Making the international student caps bill less bad

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Today is the likely final day of public hearings for the international student caps bill, ahead of a report due on 8 October.

Despite the strong campaign against this bill the political reality is that the Opposition supports provider-level caps. This gives scope for a compromise that will see the bill pass in some form.

In my final submission to the Senate inquiry I focused on ways to make the bill less bad, while still letting the government and alternative government achieve their migration-related policy objectives.

Remove the course caps provision

80%+ of international students do not stay in Australia permanently. In this context, the government’s position that international students should be stopped from taking courses that don’t align with Australia’s skills needs borders on the absurd.

With over 25,000 courses registered on CRICOS regulating at the course level is also beyond the government’s administrative capacity. As Claire Field has been reporting, there are numerous errors in the much smaller task of imposing about 1,150 provider-level caps.

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More detail on international student caps

Andrew Norton5 Comments

This week the government announced the overall international student cap for 2025, of 270,000 new commencing students, with some student types not counted towards the cap. I have a high-level summary in The Conversation. This post explores the capping announcement in more detail, noting additional problems with this deeply flawed policy.

The power – or lack thereof – to exempt particular types of students

On Tuesday the government announced three new exemption categories:

  • students who are part of “twinning” arrangements, taking some of their course offshore before coming to Australia
  • students with Australian government or “key partner” foreign government scholarships
  • students from the Pacific and Timor-Leste.

On my reading of the bill, the last two exemptions are not supported by its current wording and the twinning exemption is probably not within the bill’s existing scope.

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Counting international students – the method is critical to what effects caps have

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The debate on international student caps is mostly at the level of principle. But the capping bill‘s wording is also critical to its effects. A key issue is whether the cap is based on a cumulative total of enrolled international students through a year or the total on specific dates during the year. A cumulative count will have much more serious effects on students and education providers.

The cumulative count wording of the bill

The most natural meaning of the current bill, copied in below, is that the count is cumulative – ‘a limit’ (singular) on the ‘total’ number of overseas students enrolled in one or more years. This means that the cap is driven by the peak number during the year.

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Can migration policy alone manage international student numbers?

Andrew Norton1 Comment

My paper on international student policy – new migration controls and proposed enrolment caps – is published by the ANU Migration Hub today. Some key points appear in The Conversation.

Compared to what I have already written on caps – how actual enrolments will fall below the caps and why even the government’s own agencies doubt the policy’s feasibility and fear its consequences – this paper explores the cumulative consequences to date of migration policy changes.

These consequences are already significant for vocational education and some higher education providers. This raises the question of how necessary the caps are to achieve the government’s policy goal of bringing down net overseas migration.

The policy timeline

Since October 2023 we have witnessed one of the great policy backflips of Australian political history. The Albanese government has turned from supporting the revival of international education – granting a record number of student visas in 2022-2023, extending the temporary graduate visa – to pulling almost every policy lever short of shutting the industry down to reduce international student numbers. International education now keeps political company with live sheep exports, fossil fuels, and vapes retailing.

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The government’s own agencies doubt that international student caps are feasible & fear the consequences

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Submissions to the Senate inquiry into the government’s international student caps bill are now appearing online. The House of Representatives has also started debating the bill.

My submission

The online scanned pdf version of my submission is not a sharp copy, the Word version is here.

It expands on the arguments I made in my series of blog posts on the caps, starting with this one in May.

Government agency submissions – implementation and enforcement

Submissions from government agencies raise questions about what internal processes – or rather lack of internal processes – led to the bill being presented in its current form.

The Department of Home Affairs submission leaves its key point to the last two sentences:

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Accord implementation proposals, part #2: The distribution of student places to universities and the folly of hard caps

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An earlier post looked at the government’s plans for the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. This post examines the government’s proposals for setting the number of student places and distributing them between universities. This includes a hard institution-level cap on student places, so that universities would get zero funding for enrolments above their allocated level. This post explains why a hard cap is unnecessary and counter-productive.

Overall number of CSPs

The government will determine the total number of CSPs. For ‘fully funded’ places – places for which universities are paid both a Commonwealth and student contribution – this is similar to the current system of the government deciding on total CGS funding, other than the small demand driven system for Indigenous bachelor-degree students (which will be retained). However,

  • because universities will have flexibility in moving EFTSL between disciplines (discussed in a later post) the maximum dollar amount the government pays will be less predictable than now.
  • because of the first point and hard caps on student places at each university (discussed below) the maximum number of CSPs the system provides will be more predictable than now.

It is not clear whether ATEC will advise the government on the number of CSPs, as opposed to contextual factors such as demographics, demand, and skills needs.

And if ATEC does provide advice on system-level numbers, it is not clear whether this will be published or not. The consultation paper mentions the state of the sector report recommended by the Universities Accord final report, but this is framed as a ‘report on higher education outcomes’, not future higher education needs.

Former higher education commissions provided detailed public advice on likely student demand and the sector’s capacity to meet it. For an education minister there is a trade-off. Public and quality advice gives leverage in Cabinet when arguing for money and a semi-independent justification for the government’s overall policy direction. But if the minister does not get the money the sector, and opposition MPs, will use ATEC reports against the government.

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Did bachelor degree enrolments decline significantly between 2016 and 2022?

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This is a post I started writing several months ago, before the Accord final report and other major higher education policy announcements pushed it aside. I have completed it as a companion to my census attainment post on data issues in higher education.

Late last year several media outlets, using data from the ABS Education and Work survey, reported declining bachelor degree enrolments. In November 2023, bachelor degree enrolments were said to be down 12 per cent between 2016 and 2022. Another newspaper rounded the drop to 13 per cent. In December 2023 bachelor degree enrolments were said to be at their lowest level since 2011.

This post explains why these media stories exaggerate enrolment decline. The most important reason is that Education and Work does not count offshore international students. But comparing Education and Work results with enrolment data shows that it typically undercounts onshore international students and overcounts domestic students, particularly those in bachelor degrees. It also has occasional rogue surveys that produce misleading comparison years.

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