Caps on international student enrolments for Australia’s institutions are expected to be calculated over the next three months, said education minister Jason Clare in an interview with Sky News on June 9.
“I’m expecting the focus here and the work that we’ll do will take place over the next three months to set what those caps are, but the focus will be on the caps for the institutions rather than the courses,” said Clare.
In May, it was first suggested that Clare could cap a limit for the maximum number of new international student enrolments at any institution as part of a new international education and skills strategic framework – a move that was later reiterated in the Australian budget for 2024/25.
The aim of the legislation and draft framework is to ensure “there is no place for dodgy operators”, Brendan O’Connor, minister for skills and training, said at the time.
The policy is a reaction to “a lot of universities” asking for such a limit, due to what he describes as the “uneven” nature of the sector over the last few years, Clare said in the televised interview.
He refused to name institutions when pressed by the Sky News journalist but specified that smaller universities have been pushing him for such a system.
Clare went on to describe the country’s international education sector as “pretty much… unregulated” at the moment.
He noted that there is “effectively a cap” on the amount of money provided to institutions to fund domestic students.
“It doesn’t work like that for international students at the moment. I think there’s a certain logic and common sense here, that if we regulate the number of Australian students, that we should do that also for international students.”
The move is part of an effort to “maintain the social licence for this important export”, said Clare.
“Remember, this is the biggest export we don’t dig out of the ground, it’s worth $48 billion, and if we set this up and regulate it the right way, it will help to make sure that we can continue to have that sector grow over the longer term.”
However, one key stakeholder in the VET sector is claiming a “false narrative” is being played out in the ongoing debate and has taken issue with some of the points made by Clare in his interview with Sky News, disagreeing with Clare attributing the the growth in onshore international students to those undertaking skills training courses rather than higher education courses.
In a letter to Clare obtained by The PIE News, Troy Williams, chief executive of the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia, expressed concern that the politician had been “poorly briefed” when making his comment on VET enrolments.
“There’s about 10% more international students in our universities today than before the pandemic, and there’s about 50% more international students in our vocational institutions than before the pandemic as well,” Clare told Sky News.
“So we’ve seen the big jump, not in universities, but in VET,” he continued.
But Williams believes that when looking at the growth in the number of onshore international students, government should instead look at the number of offshore primary student visa grants, rather than international enrolments and said that until that narrative is played out, Clare’s statement is “without merit”.
Williams previously called out the government’s migration strategy, released in December, calling it “highly problematic” for the VET sector, and claiming it “ignores the high-quality skills training outcomes that the majority of international students in Australia receive”.
The strategy had pointed to evidence that graduate visa holders are returning to study when their visa runs out in order to remain in Australia – and using VET courses to do it.
“In effect, there’s backdoors in the system that have encouraged people to come here to do a uni degree, then switch to a VET course, never turn up to the VET course and really just use that as the price you pay to work here,” Clare said.
“We’ve shut down a number of those systems… so you’ve got to tackle all of those problems where the system’s been corrupted, but at the same time we’ve also got to make sure that we set it in a way that’s regulated, a little bit like domestic students are too.”
