Category: Migrants and migration

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 Norton5 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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Reducing the number of ‘permanently temporary’ former international students

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While I agree with the goals of today’s big migration policy changes, they will make life more difficult for universities relying on migration-motivated international students. In most cases, former international students will be able to stay in Australia on temporary graduate visas for less time than now. Other options for remaining in Australia, such as returning to a student visa, will become more difficult.

These policy changes aim to reduce temporary migrant numbers. The pressure temporary migrants place on accommodation and other services made this an urgent policy and political issue. But prior to this there were also significant concerns about temporary migrants themselves, in their vulnerability to labour market exploitation and prolonging their time in Australia in the often false hope of eventual permanent residence, as ‘permanently temporary’ migrants. The Parkinson migration review, released in March this year, set out an agenda for change.

Future policy on permanent residence is still under development, with some signals discussed below. Whether the number of former international students getting PR will go down remains to be seen. But clearer rules will mean PR aspirants can cut their losses at an earlier point. Fewer will delay important career and family events and decisions due to uncertainty about their long-term country of residence.

Shorter-stay temporary graduate visas

In September 2022 the government announced its decision to add two years to the sub-class 485 temporary graduate visa for graduates with degrees in areas of ‘verified skill shortages’. In the critique I wrote at the time I was ‘far from convinced that a 485 time extension is a good or ethical policy’, and so I am glad that this policy will be abolished.

As the chart below from the migration plan shows, they will also cut the base time period for a masters by coursework from three years to two years, and for a PhD from four years to three years. The regional extension, however, will remain.

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Mapping Australian higher education 2023 – official release

Andrew Norton2 Comments

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

Mapping Australian higher education 2023 is now available from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods website.

Update 30/10/2024: There is a later version of Mapping 2023’s data here.

Update 26/10/23: A reader has pointed out that list of FEE-HELP NUHEPs is incomplete. A column of names from the original Excel file was omitted during production. The full list is available here. This list also includes three non-FEE-HELP providers registered by TEQSA since the pdf version was finalised. A corrected version of Mapping with the full list of NUHEPs, as of mid-2023, is here.

If anyone has noticed other errors please let me know.

Higher education participation rates by time of migration and language spoken at home

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Some 2021 Census is now available on the ABS TableBuilder site, allowing additional analysis of the social and personal characteristics of higher education students. This posts looks at migration status and language spoken at home, previous strong predictors of higher education participation rates.

Year of arrival

In 2021 migrants who had taken out citizenship were significantly more likely than people born in Australia to be enrolled in university in the post-school 18 to 20 years old age bracket. The participation gap was 19 percentage points for migrants in the decade prior to the 2021 census, 54 per cent participation compared to 35 per cent for young adults who were born in Australia. Migrants who arrived as younger children have a higher participation rate again, at 59 per cent.

Language spoken at home

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Extending the 485 visa by two years will exacerbate the problems of Australia’s temporary migration program

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“…migration should not simply be about bringing in workers in to fill gaps, it should be about helping people put down roots, to join in the life of our country towns and suburbs. To make a home, to raise a family, to join our Australian family – strengthening our economy and our great multicultural society.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Jobs and Skills Summit, 2 September 2022

The rise of temporary migration

Thirty years ago Anthony Albanese’s statement would have restated migration orthodoxy. Australia rejected the ‘guest worker’ model of Germany or Singapore or the Gulf states. Most long-term migrants were permanent residents on arrival, with pathways to citizenship. While over time policy moved from assimilation to multiculturalism, the expectation that most ‘join our Australian family’ was a constant.

But from the mid-1990s temporary multi-year visa migration became more common. Major categories included international students, skilled workers and later temporary graduate visas. Working holiday visas and the long-standing open border with New Zealand also increased non-tourist resident numbers. Their total population peaked at 1.7 million in 2019 but fell to 1.2 million during COVID border closures before starting to recover.

Permanent migration is now typically a two step process. In 2018-19, before COVID, 68 per cent of primary applicants for skilled migration were already in Australia; the 85 per cent in 2020-21 will probably come down with reopened borders. Including partner and family migrants 65 per cent of permanent migrants were onshore applicants in 2020-21.

The problems of temporary migration

Temporary migrants freely choose Australia, but life is not easy for them. They are vulnerable to exploitation in the labour market. They pay taxes but are ineligible for most government benefits (although from mid-2021 they did get disaster payments.) Temporary migrants could never vote and have had other political rights reduced.

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Further restrictions on the political freedoms of international students and other temporary migrants

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Despite a COVID-driven dip to 1.6 million, Australia remains a country with high numbers of long-term migrants without the rights that come with permanent residence or citizenship. In many areas of public policy we are struggling, often unsuccessfully in my opinion, to deal with the social and political implications of this population, of which international students are the second largest category after New Zealanders.

A recent article in The Conversation by election law expert Graeme Orr drew my attention to a further example of unjustifiable, and in his view potentially unconstitutional, treatment of temporary migrants. For some years now the government has been preoccupied with ‘foreign’ (ie Chinese) influence. One response has been stripping temporary migrants of political rights.

Three years ago I wrote a post criticising restrictions on temporary migrants being able to make political donations. Legislation passed this week takes these restrictions much further, covering other kinds of political expenditure and activity.

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Student employment is at record levels, but can it last?

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In March 2020, as Australians realised that COVID was a major problem, I wrote a pessimistic post about student employment. For a while during 2020 that pessimism was justified. But not in 2021. Tertiary student employment is at an all-time high, driven by more jobs and less labour market competition.

Retrenchment

For the ABS Participation, Job Search and Mobility survey the sample is full-time students who have completed Year 12 but have no post-school qualifications. For this group retrenchments were high in 2020. Of the people who were students in February 2021, and had been employed in February 2020, 6.5 per cent had been retrenched over the previous 12 months. This compares to retrenchment rates of about 2 per cent a year in the 2016-2020 period.

The ABS monthly and quarterly labour market reports do not include retrenchments by student status, but do provide a time series for 15-24 year old workers. About 24 per cent of those workers were full-time tertiary students in 2020. As the chart below shows, retrenchments for 15-24 year olds spiked in the May and August quarters. In the May 2020 quarter they were 31 per cent of all retrenchments. JobKeeper slowed overall job losses from the end of March, but this demographic is relatively high on people not meeting its personal eligibility criteria. Temporary migrants such as an international students were not included in JobKeeper and casuals needed to have been in their job for 12 months.

Employment to population ratio

The main analysis supported by the labour force statistics is full-time tertiary students aged 15-24 years. The chart below shows that just between March and April 2020 the proportion of tertiary students in employment fell significantly, down nearly 9 percentage points. Student employment levels were already coming off their summer peak, with employment rates declining from 65 per cent in December 2019 to 46 per cent in May 2020.

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