Ever since Scott Morrison told overseas students to go home at the start of the pandemic and then stomped on the student visa accelerator once the pandemic ended, overseas student numbers have increased and policy has been fraught with constant changes to reduce the inflow of students.

Getting overseas student policy right is not only critical to our universities, but also to managing long-term population and immigration policy because it makes up between 40% to 50% of net migration.

On the one hand, we have international education lobby groups who think policy in this space should have a single overriding goal; that is, to maximise tuition fee revenue. They seem incapable of recognising that if this was the only goal, government could simply tell visa-processing officers to rubber stamp every student visa application. Tuition fee revenue would boom and education providers would think all their Christmases had come at once. You can imagine all the vice-chancellors and dodgy college owners sitting in their counting houses counting all their money.

International lobby groups refuse to accept that students are the biggest subset of net overseas migration and that the Australian public expects the government to manage net overseas migration in the long-term national interest, not just the financial interests of education providers. These lobby groups seem to think it’s just fine for there to be a massive and growing number of students and former students stuck in immigration limbo (there are about 1.1 million students and former students in Australia on some form of temporary visa – near an all-time record). Many of these students have paid a fortune to education providers to secure a pathway to permanent residence, but won’t achieve this objective and do not wish to go home.

On the other hand, both major parties refuse to develop a plan to manage net migration and explain how overseas students fit within that plan. While Peter Dutton is now engaged in a net migration bidding auction (he is promising net migration will be 100,000 less than whatever Labor says it wants), that is not a plan for managing net migration.

Both major parties say they want to manage overseas student numbers by using caps on how many overseas students each of the approximately 1400 providers in the industry can bring in. Dutton was right to say that was a recipe for chaos, but he is happy to announce he will replicate that policy, just in a harsher manner, for public universities.

Apart from the chaos created by having to set student caps for each provider annually (an incredibly inefficient process which gives providers no certainty to plan for the future but to just engage in an annual dispute with government), caps do nothing for:

• Quality of students providers recruit;
• Integrity of the courses delivered; and
• Targeting the skills we need and maximising the chances the student gets a skilled job after graduating.

What should be done?

A starting point for long-term overseas student policy must be to establish a long-term net migration target and the student contribution to that. In designing overseas student policy, we must start by establishing clear objectives. Yes, the export income earned is important, as is the ability of universities to use that revenue to subsidise costs of education for domestic students and for investing in research. But also important is:

• Management of student numbers consistent with long-term net migration;
• Ensuring we genuinely are attracting the best and brightest students;
• Minimising risks of the student visa being rorted;
• Targeting the courses students undertake to our long-term skill needs; and
• Minimising the number of students who get stuck in immigration limbo.

To that end, I would recommend the following:

• Introduce a university entrance exam in English that is run on a cost-recovery basis by providers independent of those who are tasked to develop the exam and who have no role in student recruitment, migration advice or in operating education providers who rely on student tuition revenue. This exam should be the primary tool for determining which applicants receive a student visa with a minimum pass mark set by government based on its target for the student contribution to net migration and designed to minimise the number of students in immigration limbo.
• For students seeking to undertake a VET course, strictly confine these to qualifications in long-term demand (eg construction trade courses) and establish objective criteria to determine who would be eligible to undertake such courses. Only VET courses that require a number of years to secure a qualification should be eligible, not short courses as those are most likely to be rorted.
• Introduce a mandatory “no further stay” condition for students applying for short English courses or non-award courses. There is no reason for students doing these courses to extend their stay.
• Introduce largely objective criteria for students who seek to extend their stay by applying for an onshore student visa. That would make clear who is eligible for a further student visa onshore.
• Abolish risk rating by individual providers and confine these to risk rating by sector and by source nation. Confine risk-rating calculations to genuinely negative outcomes, not subjective refusal rates. Strengthen the ability of regulators to deal with dodgy providers, including use of poor immigration outcomes as a basis for penalties.
• Restrict access to temporary graduate visas to students who have completed high-quality courses in areas of long-term demand.

Most of the above changes could be introduced as early as November 2025, as they do not require primary legislation.

Read Part 1 of this article from Abul Rizvi

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/04/if-i-was-immigration-minister-i-would-develop-a-population-plan/