TEQSA’s Peter Coaldrake delivers warning on international students

Regulator warns many international students are not qualified for their courses and not genuinely intending to study.

TEQSA chief commissioner Peter Coaldrake

The higher education regulator has warned universities and colleges of a “significant” risk that large numbers of international students arriving in Australia are not qualified for their course and not genuinely intending to study.

In a letter sent on Friday, Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency chief commissioner Peter Coaldrake told ­higher education institutions he was currently investigating several of them for lack of compliance with standards and that the integrity of the international education sector was at risk.

In a “sector alert” issued with Professor Coaldrake’s letter, TEQSA said it had observed escalating risk factors including high numbers of international students arriving “without appropriate qualifications or academic preparedness for their course of study” and “who are not bona-fide or will not comply with the terms of their visa”.

TEQSA also said it was seeing increased levels of unethical ­behaviour by education agents, with high numbers of newly ­arrived international students leaving the course they enrolled in and transferring to so-called ghost courses at other higher education institutions or vocational colleges.

This practise has alarmed industry experts who say students enrolled in reputable university courses are being urged to switch to cheap, low-quality courses at other institutions which allow them to remain in Australia and work, with no genuine purpose of study. International Education Association of Australia CEO Phil Honeywood said this behaviour was exacerbated by the Morrison government’s decision during Covid to remove the 40-hour a fortnight cap on working hours for international students, allowing them to work full-time. (Last month the cap was restored at 48 hours.)

“We now have far more education agents working closely with dodgy (education) providers to poach legitimate students into ghost courses,” he said.

He welcomed TEQSA’s warning to higher education providers, saying it was “long overdue” but called on the regulator and the federal government to take tougher action against dodgy colleges and education agents.

“We may need to learn from the recent example of Canada where they cancelled 700 student visas because the visa holders were judged to be non-genuine students,” Mr Honeywood said. “That sent a message to both education agents and dodgy providers that the Canadian regulator was becoming more vigilant.”

He said the government and regulatory authorities needed to get more serious.

“Words are one thing. The ­allocation of resources to do something about this endemic bad behaviour is going to be the next challenge,” he said.

In its sector alert, TEQSA also told higher education providers that it had seen an increase in numbers of international students being enrolled “without being provided sufficient information about their chosen provider, course, or life and study in Australia”.