Universities ‘prioritising’ overseas students, neglecting local STEM pupils, study finds

Mismanagement of Australia’s migration policy is short-changing local STEM students while making the local skills crisis worse, according to a new study by population expert Bob Birrell.

Mismanagement of Australia’s migration policy is short-changing local STEM students while making the local skills crisis worse — and will soon cause Sydneysiders to resist increases in medium and high density housing in their suburbs, according to a new study by population expert Bob Birrell, chief of The Australian Population Research Institute.

The report, released Thursday, found that while in 2020 some 40 per cent of university completions went to overseas students, an increasing number of these degrees were in subjects that bore little relevance to the local economy.

“Most of the overseas student graduates are in fields with no relevance to Australia’s urgent skill needs,” the study found, thanks in part to incentives for universities to train overseas rather than local students.

“The universities have prioritised the teaching of overseas students, because they keep all the proceeds and because they can charge what the market will bear … fee revenue from overseas students currently makes up some 27 per cent of total university funding,” it stated.

At the same time, “nearly half (of all degrees to overseas students) are in Management and Commerce, despite there being no domestic shortage of such graduates.”

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It also chided universities for “their miserable record in training locals in key STEM fields,” saying that the Albanese government’s stated intention to make the training of overseas students an integral part of Australia’s skilled training policy would hurt local students.

“The proposed policy, should it be allowed to proceed, would be at the expense of opportunities for domestic students,” it stated.

The study accused the Labor migration proposal of prioritising overseas students over the education of Australian children. Picture: David Caird

“These are students who have achieved much higher academic standards at year 12 than are required by overseas students, but cannot find university places.”

Mr Birrell also told The Daily Telegraph that the while increasing population may grow the overall economy, it did little to increase productivity.

“Over the last decade or so we have become a city building, people servicing economy, when almost all of the real productivity is found in manufacturing and mining,” he said.

“As a matter of equity there should be greater opening on the edge of the city but that’s not what’s happening in Sydney.”

Bob Birrell is the head of The Australian Population Research Institute, and says we are badly getting our migration settings wrong.

“Sydney receives a huge amount of the country’s net overseas migration, but they’ve simply been forced to accept these numbers and try to accept as best they can … as a result the pressure on the population is such that Sydney is now the second most expensive place to buy a detached house following Hong Kong.”

“Politicians are trying to pile people into more high rise and medium density housing, which of course is increasingly resisted by existing residents who don’t want to see their neighbourhoods transformed.”

Originally published as Universities ‘prioritising’ overseas students, neglecting local STEM pupils, study finds