Australia: Collapse in foreign student numbers

By Geoff Maslen. Australia's universities face further sharp falls in enrolments of overseas students, with many institutions already suffering the effects of a massive downturn and the loss of millions of dollars in fee revenues. A report released last week predicts a continuing decline following a government clampdown on foreign graduating students gaining permanent residency.
For the past decade, the lure of a permanent resident's visa has attracted an ever-increasing number of Asian students - mostly Indian and Chinese - who have enrolled in universities and technical colleges in their tens of thousands. But the report, based on an analysis of Immigration Department data by Dr Bob Birrell and other researchers at Monash University, says unpublished departmental estimates suggest that under the government's new points test, the number of applicants seeing permanent visas will fall to around 4,000 a year - down from 20,000 two years ago.
"This tougher access to a points-tested permanent residence visa will add a further disincentive for study in Australia. As a consequence it is unlikely that there will be any medium-term spike in net annual migration from overseas students," the report states. "The share of the skilled visa programme allocated to the points-tested visas has been reduced and priority is to be given to applicants with good English and skilled work experience. These visas have been heavily used by former overseas students [and], as a result of the changes, the number of visas issued to former overseas students will fall sharply, thus largely removing the incentive to study in Australia as a pathway to gaining permanent residence." The report is the first in an expected series of online commentaries to be produced by Birrell's Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash following the forced closure of his long-standing publication People and Place earlier this year.
The 50-page report, Immigration and the Resources Boom Mark 2, discusses immigration to Australia and calls for a savage cut in the number of migrants entering the country, in line with the rapid collapse in foreign student enrolments. Earlier this year, Immigration Department leaks suggested visa applications from China were down by 20% although university leaders feared the slump could be even double this figure. China is now Australia's largest source country for foreign students and they comprise one in four of the 400,000 overseas students enrolled in education institutions and about a third of the nearly 200,000 undertaking higher education courses.
Enrolments from India, the second largest source country, have been affected even more severely by the tighter visa restrictions as well as worldwide publicity last year regarding attacks on Indian students in the eastern state capitals. The rising value of the Australian dollar, along with increasing competition from Britain and America, have added to the pressures on foreign students to look elsewhere to study. It will be no comfort to the heads of Australia's education institutions to know that tens of thousands of former overseas students are nevertheless likely to become permanent residents as a result of the government's changes. Birrell's report says these are students who had applied for permanent visas before the new rules were introduced and they will benefit from the transitional arrangements in place. "Applications for permanent residence from these students will crowd out better qualified applicants for several years. Students, who applied for a points-tested visa prior to 8 February 2010, have been stockpiled - they have been granted bridging visas with full work rights and promised their application will eventually be processed according to the rules that were current when they applied," the report says. "Overseas students who had already been issued with a visa by 8 February, or who were in the pipeline of overseas students awaiting assessment of their application, can also apply for a points-tested visa under the selection rules as long as they do so before the end of 2012."
The number of students in these categories are substantial. The report says that as of last December, more than 29,000 former vocational education sector students were holding bridging visas while another 26,000 had been enrolled in higher education courses. "Most of those who have not already applied for a points-tested visa can do so under the pre-8 February rules. They will have to be processed eventually and when they are most will succeed, including thousands of cooks," Birrell's report states.