‘Prune the tree’: Halting new colleges considered amid student visa crackdown

A moratorium on new colleges is one of a raft of proposals under consideration as the federal government looks to use a crackdown on student visas to cut migration.

Skills and Training Minister Brendan O’Connor said the government was also looking at measures that could stop the exploitation of vulnerable students. One option is to beef up the regulator to help weed out unscrupulous providers already in the vocational education and training system.

Brendan O’Connor wants to remove “dodgy” training providers from the VET sector.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“My priority is to remove current dodgy, bottom-feeding training providers from the VET sector and to stop new such ones entering,” O’Connor said, adding the sector had ballooned to more than 4000 providers under the previous government.

“The Albanese government makes no apology for going after substandard providers rorting the system, especially those targeting vulnerable international students.”

Reducing the intake of international students is central to the government’s plan to halve net overseas migration by June 2025. Net migration blew out to a record of 518,000 last financial year as foreign students returned after the pandemic.

Foreign students will now face stricter English-language tests and will have to prove they are genuine students before entering the country.

The migration strategy launched earlier this month by Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles will take into consideration recommendations by a parliamentary committee chaired by Labor senator Deborah O’Neill to crack down on colleges.

O’Neill said at the launch there were about 650,000 international students in Australia, a figure that was expected to grow.

The committee’s report, published in October, called for the Australian Skills Quality Authority to pause the processing of new applications for international colleges, with limited exceptions for those with industry links or endorsed by state and territory governments.

It also recommended requiring providers wanting to teach international students to have taught domestic students for at least 12 months, and cancelling the registration of any that had not taught students for at least a year.

The government announced in October it would ban private colleges from paying commissions to education agents who poach students from rival institutions, as one of several measures responding to the systemic exploitation of the migration system revealed in the Nixon review.

“We have already strengthened fit-and-proper persons requirements to become a VET provider, increased funding to the regulator to establish a dedicated integrity unit to clamp down on misconduct, and bolstered regulatory ties with law enforcement and other agencies to fight the scourge of bad actors targeting our world-renowned education and training sector,” O’Connor said.

The integrity overhaul is also designed to eliminate so-called ghost colleges that offer phoney courses as a front to funnel student visa holders into low-skilled and low-paid work.

Committee member and Labor MP Julian Hill said former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon’s review, evidence to the parliamentary inquiry, and sector intelligence “indicate serious concerns with rapid growth at the bottom end of the private VET sector in particular”.

“International education is wonderful for Australia overall, but the committee was very clear that the government should not be afraid to take firm, even ruthless actions to restore integrity – if you like, pruning the tree to save the tree,” he said.

“Rapid growth in registration of new providers and recruitment to low-value VET qualifications with no skilled migration pathways ring alarm bells, and given the imperative to moderate growth in student numbers, the bipartisan committee report proposed direct action.”

But Troy Williams, chief executive of the Independent Tertiary Education Council of Australia, said pausing new international provider approvals would be “nonsensical and unhelpful”.

“What the Australian government appears to be signalling is ‘we just don’t want to support the international skills training sector’,” Williams said.

“It’s one of the few areas across the entire Australian economy where the Australian government is seeking to cruel a strong export market.”

Comment has been sought from opposition skills and training spokeswoman Sussan Ley.

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