Government to set cap on international student enrolment

In response to the rapid growth of international student numbers post-COVID, Australia’s Labor government has proposed a legislative package that will cap the number of international students seeking to pursue a tertiary education in the country’s higher education sector.

In his budget speech on 14 May, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the government will limit how many international students can be enrolled by each university based on a formula, including how much housing they build.

Under the plan, there would be a pause on applications for registration from new international education providers and of new courses from existing providers for periods of up to 12 months.

“We think we should manage the amount of foreign students in the system,” Chalmers said in an interview with ABC Brisbane. “We think international education is a huge opportunity for Australia. We are big, enthusiastic supporters of it, but we need to make sure we can manage the growth.”

Introducing the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill to parliament on 16 May, Education Minister Jason Clare said the move would allow the ministry to “limit the delivery of courses with systemic quality issues, limited value to Australia’s critical skills need or where it is in the public interest to do so – for instance, where students are being exploited”.

He said higher education was a AU$48 billion (US$32 billion) industry and the country’s fourth largest export overall, educating three million people from around the world in the last decade.

A sector ‘founded on integrity’

Another component in the legislative package is the draft International Education and Skills Strategic Framework, launched by the government on 11 May, which claims to set “a new direction — for a sustainable, high-quality, and diverse international education and training sector, founded on integrity”.

In terms of the framework, a higher education provider that has not delivered a course to international students for a period of 12 months will have its registration cancelled.

Similarly, it introduces the ability for the minister for education to stop accepting or processing applications for registration of new providers and new courses.

The government will be able to set limits on enrolments at a provider level with effect from 1 January 2025.

High schools and postgraduate research enrolments are exempt from the caps.

Clare said the plan was designed to ensure that the international education industry delivers the “greatest benefit” to Australia whilst “maintaining its social licence” from the Australian people.

He said limits “may relate to a [higher education] provider level ‘total enrolment limit’, or at the course level imposing a ‘course enrolment limit’, or a combination of the two … In setting enrolment limits, the minister for education will take into account the relevance of courses to Australia’s skills needs”.

Course-level limits

Commenting on these developments, Andrew Norton, professor in the practice of higher education policy at the Australian National University's Centre for Social Research and Methods, told University World News the cap is designed to ease pressure on accommodation and other services, and contribute to easing associated political problems.

He said capping international student numbers down to a course level, as announced over the weekend, is a bad move.

“The caps will face all the problems I have identified with bureaucratic allocation of domestic student funding. Because numbers will be allocated between universities and courses according to a politician or bureaucrat’s view of where students should enrol, rather than where students want to enrol, actual enrolments are likely to be well below the capped level,” he said.

He said some international student interests and career plans overlap with skills shortages in Australia. “As occupations with skills shortages are typically favoured in migration policy, the prospective students with a strong interest in migration already have an incentive to take these courses from amongst the courses that interest them,” he said.

Cautious response

There has been a cautious reaction to the move.

The peak body for the tertiary sector, Universities Australia, has said that it would work closely with the government to ensure no harm is done.

Luke Sheehy, CEO of Universities Australia, was quoted by The Guardian as saying that the decades of careful and strategic work by universities and the government has seen Australia grow to be a leading provider of international education that can’t be left to waste.

“We will be working closely with the government to co-design the policy settings needed to give the international education sector a strong and sustainable footing from which to grow into the future.”

Similarly cautious reaction came from the alliance of eight leading universities, the Group of Eight (Go8). Chief Executive of the Go8, Vicki Thomson, told The Guardian that any mix of policy settings must be considered, and nuanced.

“If the problems are neither simple nor one-dimensional then the solutions won’t be either,” she said. “Go8 universities and purpose-built student accommodation providers are already investing heavily in affordable student accommodation options.”

According to the country’s public broadcaster, the ABC, across all Australian universities, the number of international students has increased nearly 2.5 times since 2005, with Chinese students increasing more than threefold.

Australian Department of Education data showed there were 975,229 international students enrolled in 2023, 437,485 of whom were university students.