University complaints help Clare make the case on overseas student caps

There is policy and politics in the reasons the government wants to impose caps on new international students arriving in Australia next year. But the stridency of wealthy universities that make enormous amounts of money from overseas enrolments has helped federal Education Minister Jason Clare make his case. Mr Clare has a bill, now stalled in the Senate, to establish a cap on the number of new students each university and college can enrol annually starting next year. International student enrolments are enormous – 810,000 in May, up 17 per cent on the last corresponding month pre-pandemic in 2019. While Mr Clare says he does not look at Labor Party focus groups, the government has made two cases for quotas on new arrivals that work politically.

One is the need to stop people, often from India, who come to Australia to work arriving on student visas and enrolling in bodgy colleges that give them the cover they need. The other is the assumption, encouraged by the government, that so many international students competing for housing push up prices. And so Mr Clare wants to crack down, especially on private vocational education colleges. This is unfair to most, honest, small businesses providing services to international students that the vast public TAFE system is too inert to pursue. But Mr Clare also is targeting universities that make vast amounts from international students – in NSW last year, international students paid $3.6bn in study fees, $1bn-plus more than locals (most from government). This all feeds the still common but absolutely incorrect perception in the community that somehow international students take university places away from Australians. And it gets the government some way off the cost-of-renting hook. The richest universities, notably through their lobby, the Group of Eight, have helped Mr Clare make his case by stridently complaining about their quotas, which would reduce international enrolments in the worst cases by just under 20 per cent on last year.

What happens now is up to the Senate. The opposition correctly slams the bill for slugging legitimate private providers and for anomalies in the number given many universities, but the Coalition also proposes an immigration crackdown and to knock back the bill would give Mr Clare a free kick from now until the next election. One way or another, quotas will likely continue on the policy agenda, which the government thinks is what the community wants. And if they do the university system will not collapse – whatever the Go8 warns.