Category: International students

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 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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How much difference will stopping student visa applications from people on visitor visas make?

Andrew Norton2 Comments

The bad news for international education keeps coming. On Wednesday the government announced that onshore visitor visa holders would no longer be able to apply for a student visa. It also announced a 1 July 2024 implementation date for the ban on temporary graduate visa holders applying for a student visa. The temporary graduate visa policy was announced last December.

How big is the visitor visa change?

The government’s media release says that 36,000 onshore visitor visa holders applied for a student visa in the financial year to May 2024. However the number of visas granted will be much lower than that. As of the end of April 2024 13,733 primary applicant student visas had been granted to onshore visitor visa holders in 2023-24. Secondary visa holders – partners and children – take the number to 17,729.

These numbers are for all levels of education. Higher education primary applicants are about a quarter of the total for this time period. In 2023-24 up to April 3,332 higher student visas grants were made for primary applicants, with secondary applicants taking the total to 4,742.

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A cap-and-trade system for international student places

Andrew Norton2 Comments

In an earlier post I argued that the government’s plans to cap international student numbers, including by education provider and course, would cause actual enrolments to fall well below the official maximum number.

This is due to the inherent weaknesses of bureaucratic systems of student place allocation. Even when meeting demand is a goal the limited information held by central planners, and the long time lags between allocations and enrolments, will cause student places to remain unused.

This post proposes a partial remedy to this problem, a cap-and-trade system for international student places.

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The legal detail of the government’s plans to cap international student numbers

Andrew Norton1 Comment

In an earlier post I criticised the government’s plans to cap international students by education provider and course.

This post goes through the capping legal detail of the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024, which if passed would amend the Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000.

The amending bill contains other provisions on education agents and education providers designed to limit misconduct in the international student market. This post does not cover these provisions, but Tracy Harris discusses them here.

In this summary, unless specified otherwise, the sections mentioned refer to the amending bill but use the section number as it would appear, if passed, in a revised compilation of the ESOS Act 2000. I also refer to the bill’s explanatory memorandum, which explains the intent behind some provisions. It can be downloaded from the bill’s webpage. The Parliamentary Library’s bills digest is also helpful.

Italicised phrases other than section headings highlight powers that give the minister wide discretion. I see this as a significant problem over-and-above the direct consequences of capping.

On what can international student enrolment limits be imposed?

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Limits on international student numbers could reduce enrolments to well below the official cap

Andrew Norton3 Comments

I am not opposed to changing international student migration rules and education provider requirements to moderate problems long associated with international education, including “dodgy” colleges, inadequate student preparation, student poverty, student exploitation and “permanently temporary” migration.

Multiple steps towards minimising these problems have already been announced or taken, with increased financial requirements for a student visa added last week. Most changes announced before last Saturday are justifiable.

But capping international student numbers including down to a course level, as announced over the weekend, is a bad move.

The caps will face all the problems I have identified with bureaucratic allocation of domestic student funding. Because numbers will be allocated between universities and courses according to a politician or bureaucrat’s view of where students should enrol, rather than where students want to enrol, actual enrolments are likely to be well below the capped level.

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