The universities set to lose millions of dollars in international student crackdown

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Universities and private colleges considered at high risk of recruiting international students to Australia to work rather than study stand to lose tens of millions of dollars in revenue under the government’s new migration strategy.

Federation University and La Trobe in Victoria and Wollongong and Newcastle universities in NSW are among those whose ability to easily recruit international students is in jeopardy, according to confidential independent ratings seen by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, who on Monday unveiled the federal government’s strategy to bring down migrant numbers.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Meanwhile, the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia, which represents hundreds of private colleges, described the new migration strategy as “reckless” and said Australia’s broken visa processing system was to blame – not students.

“There is a real risk that it will diminish Australia’s reputation as a high-quality [educator of] international students,” ITECA chief executive Troy Williams said on Tuesday.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles on Monday released the federal government’s migration strategy, which plans to halve immigration numbers within two years. Australia’s net migration reached a high of 510,000 in the year to June 2023.

The strategy is designed to weed out people using the student visa system as a back door to the job market, aiming to cut new arrivals by targeting universities and colleges considered the highest risk of accepting students coming to Australia to work rather than study.

A new process to be introduced before the end of the year by the Department of Home Affairs will result in swift processing of student visa applications only for low-risk providers.

A spokesman for O’Neil said it had been put in place to protect the integrity and quality of Australia’s international education sector. “If providers are doing the wrong thing, they will face slower processing times,” he said.

The strategy will leave Australia’s most established and richest universities such as the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney largely untouched, while other universities and private colleges with a track record of recruiting non-genuine students will be targeted.

“Higher risk providers will experience slower processing times as visa decision makers consider the integrity of a provider, as well as individual student applicants,” the strategy said.

A table of university risk ratings produced by a firm working in international education based on confidential Home Affairs data – seen by this masthead – placed Victoria’s Federation University as the riskiest university for students entering Australia to work rather than study.

Universities with the best record are ranked tier one. Federation University was the only institution rated at the worst level, tier three.

A Federation University spokeswoman said it had been “disproportionately impacted by a sharp increase in visa refusals from India by the Department of Home Affairs earlier this year, which has now been addressed”.

“We are confident that following ongoing consultation with the Department of Home Affairs that we will return to a tier two rating for 2024,” she said.

Private colleges with higher risk ratings will also have their student numbers cut by the strategy.

ITECA said in a statement that the new migration strategy was “highly problematic, based on broad and often inaccurate generalisations about quality [in private colleges], and data from a broken visa processing system”.

“The language in the migration strategy is reckless,” Williams said. He warned of a potential “massive overcorrection” that would hurt the entire international skills training sector.

Visa grant rates had already begun to fall in recent months amid controversy over visa rorting, students moving to lower-cost courses, ghost colleges that act as shopfronts for so-called students to access the jobs market, corrupt agents and the exploitation of students.

Among the measures to be put in place to reduce student numbers are a tougher English language test and a new “genuine student test” – although it is unclear how this will differ from the existing “genuine temporary entrant” statement that prospective students must complete now.

The strategy also stops international students who enrol at an Australian university from dropping out of that course after six months and switching to a cheaper vocational college.

And it winds back the post-study work rights available to tens of thousands of students, with temporary student visas available at present for stays of up to eight years. Most students will lose this right under the new strategy.

Students who are working in Australia on a “temporary graduate visa” will also be blocked from staying in the country for years more by enrolling in a new course once their graduate visa ends.

Not everyone in the sector believes the new strategy will slash international student numbers.

Associate Professor Peter Hurley, a director of the Mitchell Institute policy research group within Victoria University, said it was unlikely the new migration strategy would drastically change things.

“There are 860,000 international students and their families now in the country,” he said. “The students I think the government is targeting in this migration strategy are those in private colleges, along with those who have finished their course [and who have post-study work rights].”

Hurley said the migration strategy would simply cut back the growth of student numbers, rather than actively reducing them.

“This is the story of international migration policy over the past two decades: we have a big boom, we change the settings so numbers fall a little, and then the increase starts again,” he said.

Hurley said that England and Canada were also reining in their growth in post-study work rights because “post-pandemic, student numbers just exploded in those countries as well”.

He said Australia’s growth in international students, though, had been remarkable since the emergency phase of the pandemic had ended. “In two years, we have added about 450,000 people to the population – about the same population as Canberra – as international students returned to Australia.”

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