Università Bologna, founded in 1088 and the first to bear the name of a university, welcomed international students. They gathered in what were called nationes, lodging and carousing together. The locals complained about disruption and violence. Eventually the nationes gained special recognition of their status, though the relationship with locals remained tense.
Australia’s international students are not quite so lucky. Australia’s public universities, originally modelled on British institutions, have attracted a high proportion of international students – now more per capita than any other country. In the postwar years, the Colombo Plan offered scholarships to students from the region. A programme to foster regional universities was renamed the International Development Program (IDP) in 1981. The Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, led by the CEO of IDP, Dr Denis Blight, had a new approach. Rather than offering scholarships and aid, IDP opened offices across the region to recruit students to pay to study in Australia. Those students became a critical part of the Higher Education ecosystem. By the end of the nineties, international student fees had become essential to university budgets, allowing the so-called Group of 8 (G8) elite universities to subsidize diminishing research funding. As rankings based on research became the currency of university status, international student income was essential.
The vision was cosmopolitan, with domestic and international students forming friendships and networks. There were grumblings – economics lectures where tutors chose to speak Mandarin as the shared language; English language skills that were weak. There were scandals – private providers who took money and gave students visas, then collapsed insolvent. International students came and worked full-time, rather than studying. Exploited by the providers, they in turn exploited their visas to get on a path to permanent residence. Agents became adept at taking their cut without ensuring the students were genuine. The private higher education sector, for-profit and not-for-profit, was blamed. It was consequently increasingly regulated through the quality assurance agency, TEQSA[1].
COVID disrupted the model. Classes went online. The Australian government supported Australians who lost work as a result of the pandemic but chose not to include international students. They were to ‘go home’. Most did. The fundamental contract between the university, government and students was broken. Post-pandemic, the government was keen to get international students back. In January 2022, 97.7% of applications for student visas were accepted by the Department of Home Affairs. In 2023, the press was filled with stories of fraud, especially in students applying from the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, and from Nepal. By September of 2023, the acceptance rate for visas had fallen to 89%, and processing slowed.
Two further factors alarmed the government. In the year to March 2024, the number of international students grew by 15%. Of 671,000 international students, 128,000 were from China, 117,000 from India and 59,000 from Nepal. Not only was there a high level of geographic concentration in the source of students, but there was also concentration in their Australian destinations and areas of study. International students were focussed in Sydney Melbourne and Brisbane, studying business or information technology (IT).
At the same time, housing prices in the cities rose sharply, and the rental market grew tighter. Net migration in 2022-3 was up 73% from the previous year to 737,000. In 2023-4 it fell to 528,000, but the government wants it to fall further. Cutting international student numbers was the answer to the housing crisis, and moral panic about fraud, visas and high migration numbers. Yet there is an urgent need for skilled migration, particularly in the trades, IT, aged care, and nursing.
On 23 March 2024, English language requirements were increased and a test for ‘genuine students’ was introduced. This reinforced the pressure of tough visa approvals. The Budget of May 14 delivered a suite of measures to cut international student numbers directly. The draft strategic framework delivered by Canberra talks of sustainable growth, fulfilling skills needs and deepening international relations.[2] Surely the abuses in the system will be cleaned up, but the measures are tough. For instance,
- The price of a student visa to double from $AU710 to $AU1400, making Australian visas among the most expensive in the world.
- International student numbers will be capped, institution-by-institution. Quotas will depend inter alia on a more diverse student body and evidence of student accommodation.
- Students studying in areas of skills shortage will be preferred.
This will have a direct impact on research. Even the wealthiest public universities are concerned. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney warned of a ‘black hole’ in research funding as a consequence of the policy.
It is worse in the private sector. Private providers of higher education are managed by the regulator TEQSA which can withdraw registration. TEQSA may:
- Require new private higher education providers to demonstrate quality education delivery to Australian students before receiving registration to teach international students
- Pause the registration of students in new courses from existing and new international education providers for up to 12 months.
- Prevent Australian private higher education providers from owning agent businesses.
These measures assume a caricature of private providers as crude profit machines. That is unjustified. Some are not-for-profit, like the Lincoln Institute of Higher Education[3] in Sydney. All are required by Australian law to have highly qualified staff and strong protections for students. Many offer more intensive teaching and more personal attention than the large public universities. They are cheaper and compete with the public universities and they diversify the sector and allow competition. This will have a real impact on the Indian student market which has been the focus of much of the moral panic in the press. It is difficult not to see this as an overreaction driven by domestic political imperatives.
There has already been pushback from the universities, with some success: this week, the Albanese government announced it would not raise international student visa application fees. But the other requirements remain.
Just as in Bologna one thousand years ago, foreign students do not always please the locals.
Christina Slade is Emeritus Professor at Bath Spa University, England. She serves as a non-executive director of the Royal Society of NSW, the National Art School, Lincoln Institute of Higher Education and QS rankings.
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References
[1] Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, https://www.teqsa.gov.au/
[2] https://cgpoj.r.sp1-brevo.net/mk/cl/f/sh/SMK1E8tHeGZMVemrrgD0cMapgulL/-LilRJVylYrM
[3] Lincoln Institute of Higher Education, https://www.lincolnau.nsw.edu.au/