On Friday, Australia’s education and immigration ministers released a joint press release announcing reforms to visa arrangements to ensure a “rapid return of international students” [my emphasis]: The Morrison Government will introduce further targeted measures to support the international education sector to roar back, as international borders reopen… The new settings will extend measures to
Population Ponzi and foreign student articles are back in the mainstream media this week as the Morrison Government prepares to resume an open borders policy. The ABC is leading: Australia’s education sector at a crossroads to keep its place in the global market The Business By business reporter Samuel Yang Zarana Patel never thought her decision
Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) director James Laurenceson has warned that Australia’s education export sector could take another hit if the federal government cancels Landbridge’s 99-year lease for the Port of Darwin. Laurenceson says the Chinese government would be highly likely to respond by imposing further economic sanctions on Australia; this could include directing Chinese students
Canada’s Globe & Mail has published a detailed report on how hundreds of thousands of Indian students have inundated Canada in search of permanent residency: Grey Matters, which sees 7,000 to 8,000 students each month at its 56 locations in India, is one of many such centres in Chandigarh’s sprawling Sector-17 market, a hub of
Peter Hurley from the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University has published interesting data on the collapse in international student numbers since the pandemic began: Since March 2020, the number of international student visa holders has fallen by 205,854, or 33.5%, according to the most recent government data. Complicating this picture is that many international students will
A new study by IDP Connect reveals how the primary motivation for Indian students to study in Australia is to gain permanent residency and work rights: IDP Connect’s New Horizons research shows international students consider migration incentives and employment opportunities when choosing where, what and how to study. “We’ve seen a significant decrease in interest from Indian students looking to
A new survey by international student recruitment firm AECC Global has found that one-in-five prospective international students has changed their preference away from Australia: There has been a 15 per cent decline in Australia as the preferred destination, while interest in Canada surged 36 per cent and the UK 21 per cent… “It should be
The Fair Work Ombudsman’s (FWO) annual report shows that it launched 76 wage underpayment cases in 2020-21, compared with 54 in the previous financial year. The FWO also recovered more than $148m on behalf of victims of wage theft during the financial year, compared with just $30m three years earlier. The annual report notes that
While Melbourne University Vice Chancellor Duncan Maskell dines on a salary of around $1.5 million, tutors at the university continue to do unpaid work, according to The ABC: Students at the prestigious University of Melbourne only receive the support they need during remote learning because their tutors work unpaid, says a staff member who is
The great immigration scab grab is on, with the edu-migration industry launching a plan with the federal government to flood Australia with international students by directly linking student visas with work rights and permanent residency: Phil Honeywood, executive director of the International Education Association of Australia, said closed borders had revealed cracks in the international
The pandemic has brought to light the university sector’s ‘dirty little secret’; namely, its reliance on staff with insecure work contracts. Around 70% of the sector’s staff are on such contracts, either part-time or casual, while the underpayment of staff is widespread. The Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) has investigated 14 universities over potential underpayment of
Abul Rizvi – former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration and one of the architects of Australia’s faux ‘skilled’ migration program – has urged policy makers to tighten international student visa requirements to boost student quality and productivity: As the government faces pressure to bring overseas students back into the country, if it wants
Australia’s universities must be the nation’s worse risk managers. In the decade leading up to the pandemic, they swam in ‘rivers of gold’ from the world’s largest international student intake (see next chart), yet failed to put money aside for a rainy day. With the pandemic temporarily cutting the flow of international students, several Australian
Australia’s booming pre-COVID international education industry was built on the back of Chinese students: Before COVID hit, Australian universities had the highest concentration of Chinese students in the developed world, with around one in nine students at Australian universities Chinese in 2017: Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed dire warnings from the edu-migration industry
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) estimates that the University of Melbourne’s wage underpayment bill could ultimately top $15 million. More than 1,000 casual academics have received a combined $9.5 million in backpay, and vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell has apologised for the incident. However, Annette Herrera of the NTEU says Maskell’s apology will “ring hollow” unless
Researchers from the Mitchell Institute have released interesting data on the state of Australian university finances. It turns out that university revenues are only down 6% from their pre-pandemic level in 2019. This follows an unbroken run of revenue growth that stretched all the way back to 1995: Moreover, despite universities continually crying poor, the
Earlier this week, Professor Suresh Cuganesan – deputy dean at the University of Sydney Business School – called for the federal government to give international students even greater post-study work rights as an incentive to encourage greater enrolment numbers: From the outset we need to signal that Australia is focused on the longer-term wellbeing and
Australia’s booming pre-COVID international education industry was built on the back of Chinese students: Now Beijing has dropped the hammer on Australia’s international student trade, freezing out our universities from setting up joint courses with Chinese universities which, before the pandemic, were a popular route for Chinese students to study in Australia: No Australian university
Professor Suresh Cuganesan – deputy dean at the University of Sydney Business School – has called for the federal government to give international students even greater post-study work rights as an incentive to encourage greater numbers: “Changes to post-study work rights of international students recently proposed by federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Migration need
The University of Melbourne’s vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell has called for an overhaul of the nation’s research funding model. It is heavily subsidised by the fees paid of international students at present, but Maskell argues that there should be increased direct federal government funding. Maskell contends that this would reduce the pressure on universities to find
The Lowy Institute has unknowingly proven why the often spruiked $40 billion of education ‘exports’ – equating to more than $60,000 per international student – was a giant lie and massively exaggerated: Early changes to relax visa requirements and the cap on working hours for students in essential industries led to criticism that these measures
In 2019, Dr Gerd Schroeder-Turk – Murdoch University’s only academic representative on the Senate (the University’s highest governing body) – appeared on ABC’s Four Corners and criticised Murdoch’s international student entry and teaching standards, which drove a 92% surge in international students numbers between 2017 and 2018. Dr Schroeder-Turk’s claims were corroborated by two other
The Australian’s resident edu-migration lobby mouthpiece, Tim Dodd, has penned another puff piece calling on Australia’s universities to better look after international students: “In 2014 education exports were worth $19.8bn. Five years later, in 2019, they had more than doubled to $40.3bn. It was a gold rush”… “When students do finally return to Australia –
Anyone still arguing that immigration has no impact on wages only has to look over the pond to New Zealand, where Jacinda Ardern’s government is being lobbied to reboot immigration to relieve rising wage costs: “The dairy, horticulture, housing, services, health and broader public sector have all reported acute staff shortages, and called on the government
The Australian’s mouthpiece for the edu-migration lobby, Tim Dodd, reports that Australia’s education exports have plunged by a third: Australia’s education exports have plunged by a third due to the international border closure, with revenue dropping to $26.7bn in the year to June, down from $40.3bn recorded in calendar 2019. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures
For years we have argued that Australia’s international education industry is really an immigration play, whereby migrants effectively purchase access to work and live in Australia by studying at an Australian institution. The immigration play has been developed jointly by the federal government and education industry via: The federal government offering the most generous work
The Australian has released a report decrying the ‘collapse’ in international student numbers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic: “Australia has lost more than 100,000 foreign students in the past financial year at a cost of nearly $6bn to the economy”. “There are more than 472,000 holders of Australian student visas, including those inside and outside
Late last year, the NSW Government lodged a plan to use one third of its 3,000 hotel quarantine places to import international students, with universities (read taxpayers) to pick up the cost of quarantine. The plan was later abandoned after the state was hit with the New Year COVID outbreak, as well as backlash from
Two years ago, the regulator of Australia’s higher education institutions – the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) – held workshops around the nation in a bid to stamp-out so-called “contract cheating”, which had proliferated across Australia’s universities: The aim of the workshops is to provide strategies for institutions to promote academic integrity, address
The Australian’s higher education shill, Tim Dodd, has spent years writing propaganda about the immense ‘benefits’ of Australia’s international education (read migration) industry, while always ignoring the costs. Today Dodd seems to have experienced a mea culpa, admitting the international education model was broken all along: It is, thus, obvious that Australia’s international student business
