International student cap reform
By Nico Louw
We raised concerns in our recent report that the debate surrounding international student caps was missing the forest for the trees. By focusing entirely on the impact to net overseas immigration, we worried that the opportunity would be missed for real reform squarely aimed at improving educational quality for Australian domestic students.
Our overriding concern is that our universities have become so focused on chasing international student revenue that they are neglecting their core mission, as publicly funded institutions, of delivering a high quality education to Australian domestic students.
We found that Census data showed 1 in 12 student visa holders admitted they can’t speak English well or at all, despite being required to meet minimum English requirements to qualify for their visa. And we found extensive reporting of students who cannot speak basic English passing courses and being awarded degrees, and pressure on staff to pass international students despite widespread evidence of cheating using AI.
Unfortunately, the recent announcement from the Albanese Government on new caps, and the response of the universities and the Greens, were all as predictable as they were lamentable.
The Government has bravely announced caps that allow 145,000 new international student commencements at publicly funded universities in 2025, around the same level as 2023. This is 15 per cent more than before the pandemic in 2019 - a period during which our report showed Australia had by far the highest proportion of international students among major advanced economies, over three times the OECD average.
Postgraduate students are exempt, even though this is the area of study with the highest proportion of international students (51% of students at the University of Sydney for instance).
The Group of Eight universities are acting like this is the end of the world, because they will now only be able to enrol the same number of international students in 2025 (61,000) as they did last year (61,760). Their immediate reaction was to threaten to cut the number of places for Australian students, apparently forgetting that educating the taxpayers who fund them is their raison d'être.
In a taste of the logic we might see in a Labor-Greens minority Government, the Greens simultaneously blamed the Government for high international student numbers because they don’t fully fund university research (arguing the universities have no choice but to bring on more international students), while also claiming that even questioning international student numbers is racist, which is of course somehow the Coalition’s fault.
It’s great that we have at least reached a point where capping international student numbers is a conversation we can have. We’ll be keeping up the pressure to push for much stronger caps and to focus policy makers’ attention on educational quality objectives.
