Report says that top universities are recruiting overseas students at the expense of local ones

Universities have long said that foreign students don’t take the places of Australian hopefuls. But a new report begs to differ.

A group of international students in Melbourne.

Foreign student numbers at our top universities are booming while local student enrolments are static, according to a new report.

There were 168,985 overseas students starting courses last year at the nation’s top institutions — up 18,812 on 2016.

But the number of domestic enrolments rose by only 5143 to 416,371, the study by the Australian Population Research Institute revealed.

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Almost 40 per cent of Melbourne University’s first year enrolments are overseas students.

Melbourne University suffered a drop in local student enrolments — falling to 15,419 from 15,492, while Monash University’s enrolments increased by only 450 to 14,453.

As for foreign students, Melbourne had an extra 901 and Monash reported an extra 1550 students over the period.

In 2017, 38.7 per cent of Melbourne University’s commencing students and 39.8 per cent of Monash’s were foreign.

The report Australia’s Higher Education Overseas Student Industry Revisited, by Bob Birrell and Katharine Betts, said that the nation’s top tier universities, the so-called Group of Eight, had said in a 2014 policy paper that international students “directly facilitate domestic participation in higher education”.

“If expansion of overseas student enrolment was helping to create opportunities to increase domestic enrolments you would expect that more domestic students would be gaining places in Go8 universities,” their report said.

Report authors Dr Bob Birrell and Dr Katharine Betts from the Australian Population and Research Institute. Picture: David Geraghty

But the authors said local enrolments had remained static even when there were no federal government caps on the number of Australian students that could enrol from 2012 to 2017.

“(T)he Go8 could have taken more domestic students over these years. Many more thousands of these students would have jumped at the opportunity to attend a Go8 university,” the report said.

The authors said that Go8 universities were too financially reliant on overseas students, mainly Chinese, and they were “in no position to prioritise teaching which benefits the vocational needs of their domestic students or to focus on research activities relevant to Australian industry or the wellbeing of Australian citizens”.

The report called on the federal government to recognise the situation and give national priorities to education policy rather than university ones.

Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said it was factually wrong to claim that international students took places from Australian students.

“Even with the deep cuts made by government last Christmas to funding for student places, universities have sought to keep Australian student numbers strong,” she said.

“There are more than a million Australian students enrolled at our universities today, and 265,000 overseas students studying in Australia.”

Ms Jackson said critics should be celebrating a great Australian success story that brought $32 billion a year to support Australian jobs and wages — “not try to pit Australian students against their international friends and classmates”.

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