Rise of the ghost college: Thousands of students are enrolled in the city but they aren’t in class

They stand largely empty, hiding in plain sight, their little-used classrooms scattered through office buildings all over Melbourne’s CBD. In the exploding foreign education industry, they call them ghost colleges.

There are often several in lower-price office blocks. At 190 Queen Street, there are 20 different colleges where students can choose from 200 different courses. Stand out the front of that Queen Street office tower, though, and you won’t see many students coming and going.

In the foyer of some buildings, handwritten signs point students to the “institute” or “academy” within, offering training. Yet months of visits to many of these colleges found a near total absence of students. At some, the lights weren’t even on.

On paper, this burgeoning industry is providing tens of thousands of international students with an education – particularly students from India and Nepal. In reality, many of the colleges are near deserted.

Some don’t expect students to turn up, noting that the law does not require them to enforce attendance and pointing to other similarly deserted colleges.

After a law change in July, students are limited to online learning for a maximum of one-third of their classes – the rest must be done in person. So where are they?

University of Sydney academic Salvatore Babones says they are likely at work — as these supposed students had always intended to be.

“They are not genuinely studying. They are simply overpaying for a work visa,” he said.

Last year, Babones published a book on Australia’s incredible international student growth and argues that in some cases, the country’s student visa is really playing the part of a low-skill work visa and has become a money spinner for education providers.

“If Australia wants to import low-skill labour from South Asia, it should do it in an honest way,” Babones said. “Charge a reasonable visa fee and admit them to work.”

Experts such as Babones say the explosion in international student numbers has made a mockery of both our education and immigration systems. This year, Australia hit half-a-million international students arriving a year for the first time.

A decade ago, Australia welcomed 32,000 international students and their families from India and Nepal. By June this year, that had risen to 143,000. China went from 54,000 a decade ago to 99,000 this year. The growth this year from India alone has been ferocious: applications for tertiary education jumped from 3000 a month in March to 8000 by June.

Babones argues that while most students willingly enrol at training colleges that did not necessarily require attendance, they were still victims.

“Their visas, which are in effect work visas, nonetheless require them to subsidise Australian universities and colleges under the pretence that they are actually here to study.”

The unprecedented boom in students from India, Nepal and China has led to the proliferation of ghost colleges across Melbourne’s city centre, where there are just under 300 private vocational colleges. On Queen Street alone, there are 70 private colleges registered with the federal government.

There are now so many colleges that other education providers who do expect their students to attend are struggling to compete.

“If you put pressure on students to attend, they switch to a college where there won’t be pressure and they can work,” said Rajeev Minhas, who runs a reputable college training students in automotive mechanics. Both cookery and auto mechanics are popular certificate courses right now because they offer a pathway to permanent residency.

Minhas has been in the vocational education sector since 2007 when, he says, colleges were able to compel students to attend classes. Now, it was near impossible to compete against colleges that offered the same course but did not expect students to show up, he said.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil is well aware of the issues surrounding international education, with a spokesman saying the federal government has “inherited a migration system shot-through with rorts and completely failing to deliver for our national interest, for local workers or for people coming to this country”.

Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

A new migration strategy will be released later this year which will attempt to address issues in international education. These have been publicly highlighted both by a parliamentary inquiry that began this year and is due to report soon, and by former Victoria Police chief commissioner Christine Nixon’s review of the immigration system – prompted by reporting late last year by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes.

“Weeding out the disreputable providers and [education] agents is going to take determination and tough decisions,” said federal Labor MP Julian Hill, who is on the inquiry and is the former head of international education for the Victorian government.

Hill says many vocational colleges offer high-quality teaching to a diversity of students and make a critical contribution to skills shortages plaguing the overheating economy in the post-pandemic recovery.

“But at the bottom end, the concerns raised by reputable providers are deeply worrying. There is unacceptable behaviour and manipulation of the migration system by some private vocational colleges and dodgy agents,” he said.

According to a government source not authorised to speak publicly, it is likely the federal government will implement reforms later this year including cracking down on onshore education agents, potentially making it more difficult for students to transfer between universities and colleges, and giving more resources and power to the Australian Skills Quality Authority and the universities regulator.

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The authority regulates private colleges and has three inspectors in Victoria who can make unannounced visits to colleges. It says on-the-ground inspectors are not required to assess whether a college is complying with the rules. “We effectively target risks to quality [vocational colleges] and are not constrained by the site location of our staff,” a statement from the authority said.

Education agents make their living arranging visas for students to come to Australia. Global Reach agent Ravi Lochan Singh has recruited students to Australia for 32 years and says many who enrol in universities and then move to colleges are in reality workers – not students.

He says some private colleges target university students “to drop out of the degrees in favour of low-cost and highly flexible diplomas”. This means that often, universities recruit students from their home country, especially India, and then lose thousands of them to the vocational sector.

International Education Association of Australia chief executive Phil Honeywood has been heavily involved in previous attempts to better regulate education agents.

“[There are] an alarming number of private international colleges owned by recently arrived migrants who are taking advantage of students from their own culture. You have to question whether some of these owners are motivated more by profit than by education as a public good,” he said.

Over three months, The Age investigation repeatedly visited scores of vocational colleges across Melbourne’s city centre.

The lack of student activity was striking and did not change after new rules in July which made online learning possible only a third of the time.

Among the schools repeatedly visited by The Age was the Brighton Institute of Technology, which has campuses in Bourke Street and Docklands. The school teaches cookery, automotive mechanics and business leadership, and has capacity for 722 students.

The Age was not able to speak to any students from the school and therefore does not make any suggestion that it is exploiting student visas.

During more than 30 visits to both campuses of the school, just three students were seen exiting the Bourke Street campus, and a handful at its Docklands classroom on any visit. Visits to an upstairs classroom accessible via a public entrance on Bourke Street found it never utilised, and the lights were off on several visits.

Inside one of Brighton Institute of Technology’s classrooms.Credit: Clay Lucas

Asked about the absence of students at a college that was teaching practical courses such as cookery and automotive, a Brighton spokesperson pointed out that the national code of practice governing colleges like his — teaching only international students — had no attendance requirements.

Brighton was “not required to monitor attendance”, the spokesperson said. “As is the norm across much of the [vocational college] sector, Brighton maintains a policy and processes to monitor the progress of its students to ensure that they are making satisfactory course progress.”

The Australian Skills Quality Authority said in a statement that “greater clarity” in the rules around student attendance would support its ability to police the industry.

It also said it had made findings against Brighton twice in the past — in 2014 and 2018. The college had applied to Administrative Appeals Tribunal to review both decisions made by the authority, and had subsequently reached agreements to set aside these decisions.

Also visited repeatedly with few students in attendance was the Australian Vocational Education and Training Academy on Queen Street. Registered to accommodate 1500 students, its classrooms are accessed via a set of hard-to-find back steps off 51 Queen Street. A handwritten sign directs students: “For class, use side door stairway to mazzaine (sic) floor.”

The handwritten sign in the foyer showing the way to AVETA college in Queen Street.Credit: Justin McManus

Over nine visits to this school, there were rarely more than a dozen students present. The school did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Another schoool, Level Up, has links to the Australian Vocational Education and Training Academy and operates on the floor above. It is registered to service 544 students.

The Australian Vocational Education and Training Academy is among a handful of companies terminated from the Victorian government’s vocational funding program to help deliver skills needed in the state. A spokesman for the state government said the academy had been cut from eligibility “due to material breaches of their vocational education and training funding contract”.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority said it had received complaints in the past three years about AVETA and Brighton, and had “active, pending, or recently closed regulatory activities” for both. No adverse findings have been made against AVETA.

While many schools have few students, others cram students in to maximise returns on the days teachers are in attendance.

At Einstein College in King Street, attendance sheets obtained for a first-aid course run in July – where participants were expected to have completed practical tasks including basic emergency life support and CPR – showed 73 in attendance in a class meant to have 20 students.

Einstein College is among 16 vocational colleges in office towers along King Street.Credit: Justin McManus

An Einstein College representative agreed that too many students had done the course, and that everyone who attended had now been invited “to attend new re-training classes in much smaller class size”.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority said Einstein College had been found to be “non-compliant after an audit in February 2020 and provided with written directions to rectify breaches of conditions including obligations in training and assessment and enrolment procedures”.

The Royal Greenhill Institute of Technology (also known as Gurkha’s) is one of the city’s busiest vocational colleges. Owned by Chandra Yonzon, Victoria’s Honorary Consul General to Nepal, about 20 per cent of students at the school are Nepalese.

Yonzon says his school does not target the Nepalese community but that many others in the sector do.

Chandra Yonzon in a classroom at Royal Greenhill Institute of Technology, also known as Gurkha’s, in Elizabeth Street this week.Credit: Justin McManus

The Age does not suggest Gurkha’s or Yonzon have engaged in any wrongdoing.

“Some of the other schools opening up now, nearly 90 per cent or even 95 per cent [of their students] are Nepalese,” he says.

Yonzon, who also owns the well-known Gurkha’s Nepalese restaurants, says vocational colleges around Melbourne are “mushrooming” and that this is affecting colleges like his that provide genuine teaching and training.

“They are selling courses for a very cheap price,” says Yonzon, adding that some colleges tell students “don’t come to the class, just pay the fees and then we organise attendance [records]. This is affecting the training colleges trying to do the right things”.

Federal Skills and Training Minister Brendan O’Connor, who has responsibility for both the Australian Skills Quality Authority and the regulation of private colleges, says the government wants to ensure the vocational training sector “is high-quality and protects students”.

“We are determined to support the Commonwealth and state agencies that are collaborating ... to ensure non-genuine [vocational] providers are eliminated from the system,” he says.

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