On August 27, the Australian Education Minister revealed that a cap on international students to 270,000 would be imposed across universities and vocational sectors in 2025. At a press conference, Jason Clare stated that Australia needed ‘to protect international education from the crook [sic] who try to exploit it and we need to protect community support for it.’
Important to the announcements was the axing of Ministerial Direction 107, reproached by Australian universities for, in the words of Universities Australia Chief Executive Officer Luke Sheehy, ‘creating significant financial anxiety and pain for universities, particularly those in regional Australia and outer suburban areas’ while hampering the sector’s efforts to ‘diversify our international student base’.
The cap means that universities will have a 15 per cent higher enrolment than pre-pandemic levels, while private vocational providers will have their numbers reduced by 20 per cent. Australia’s regional universities will be able to enrol more international students than they did in 2023.
The larger universities and a slew of hybrid colleges of instruction and education used to tapping the milch cow market of international students, were upset by the government’s change of tack. Australia has more international students than any other OECD countries in percentage terms bar Luxembourg, with the Group of Eight (Go8) particularly reliant on foreign enrolments. University of Melbourne’s share comes in at 47 per cent, while the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of Queensland and the University of Adelaide have slightly lower percentage shares at over 35 per cent.
With Clare’s announcement, the gold mine had suddenly become couponed. ‘UNSW is deeply disappointed with the federal government’s proposed cuts to the 2025 international student numbers for Australian universities,’ said one spokesperson to 9News. ‘We are concerned about the detrimental impact this will have on the experience of all students, domestic and international alike.’
Vicki Thomson, Chief Executive of the Go8, thought the capping policy reckless, and particularly detrimental to those universities who ‘do the heavy lifting in research, education as well as underpinning Australia’s global reputation as a high-quality international provider.’ Typically, Thomson, as with many of those involved in the business of placing quantity over quality in terms of returns, fails to consider the deep structural problems of the university funding model. In that arid world, students are merely customers and clients, not learners pursuing knowledge.
The problem of funding the tertiary and vocational sector in Australia has become more challenging over the last three decades. The modern university has transformed into a hybrid administrative behemoth fed by economic rationalism, subsidising such pursuits as ribbon-cutting activities by overly paid vice-chancellors and their toadies, parasitic bureaucratic enlargement, marketing projects, property services and human resources.
'Whistleblowing academics exposing wasteful expenditure in the university sector need protective shield laws against institutional persecution, along with a dedicated agency to assist that end. Student caps, while necessary in assuring sustainability and fairness, is but a first step.'
Money from international student enrolments has proven invaluable in funding a dysfunctional higher education apparatus, ailments and all. The habitual taste for such fees is fuelling, in the words of the National Tertiary Education Union, ‘a culture of revenue, profit and competition’. Sheehy admits as much, stating that institutions of higher learning had ‘come to rely on international student revenue to fund everything we do in the face of declining government support in recent years – from teaching and research to infrastructure projects, employing people in well-paid jobs.’ He fails to mention the thousands of poorly paid tutors and other members of the precariat that bolster that edifice.
It has become axiomatic in Australian higher learning that much income will be drawn from the international student market. Sheehy has a point that this move was encouraged by a real decline in higher education funding in Australia relative to OECD counterparts. A problem has thereby developed out of perceived necessity: lower levels of government funding have pushed universities into alignments with private funding and international markets, turning such institutions into corporative enterprises. At points, this has imperilled those institutions, given their over dependence on such specific countries as China. (The Covid pandemic and border closures were telling on this point.)
The question about what happens to international students once they arrive in Australia is a vital matter that universities and private vocational institutions have long neglected. With Australia’s domestic student market facing its own challenges, not to mention the pressures placed by the economy on cost-of-living issues, of which accommodation is crucial, a cap on such numbers is far from illogical.
Even prior to the current economic travails, students coming to Australia from overseas faced various pressing challenges. They have been, in no small part, exploited, underpaid and seen as an additional, cheaper resource economy. Rather than focusing on studies, many such students have, over the years, found themselves propping up the food and hospitality sector rather than writing literature reviews. A 2017 report from Laurie Berg and Bassina Farbenblum noted a sample where a quarter of international students were earning $12/hr or less, while 43 per cent of students earned $15/hr or less, both figures being well below the minimum wage at that time.
The Migrant Justice Institute, of which Berg is co-executive director, launched another survey on July 8 this year inviting universities to encourage international students to take part in discussion about such issues as wage deduction, sexual harassment, and possible instances of modern slavery. The findings will be published in 2025. Such studies will only reveal part of the story, given that universities, those very same institutions notorious for underpayment and wage theft, are also involved in facilitating the project.
There is something to be said that universities and any relevant training institutions who exploit the international student market should be able to demonstrate the means and capacity to assist those enrolling in their programs. This should include assistance in such vital areas as affordable accommodation once those enrolled commence their studies.
Beyond that universities must themselves be reformed. Needless administrative replication, for which increased government funding would merely prop up, needs to be reined in. The quality of education itself needs to move beyond the supermarket check-out model that has come to plague the delivery of courses. Whistleblowing academics exposing wasteful expenditure in the university sector need protective shield laws against institutional persecution, along with a dedicated agency to assist that end. Student caps, while necessary in assuring sustainability and fairness, is but a first step.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.
Main image: Minister for Education Jason Clare speaks during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia. (Photo by Martin Ollman/Getty Images)