Australian international enrolments ‘could be 10 per cent down’

The flow of overseas students into Australian universities will fall by up to 10 per cent this year, but the policy volatility plaguing international education has run its course, according to analyst Keri Ramirez.

Ramirez said 2025 would be a “correction year”, and December’s ministerial direction 111 (MD111) would be the last major rule change for some time because further modifications were “not in the interests” of policymakers.

“That’s a set of rules that will not significantly change, in our view, in the first half of the year,” he told a webinar hosted by his Studymove consultancy. “We…know the playbook, [although there is] going to be a lot of noise around that playbook.”

Ramirez said that while international education would continue to be an election issue, the string of policy changes from December 2023 had achieved the government’s main goal of containing growth in student numbers. By September 2024, the overall tally of temporary students in Australia was just 2 per cent higher than in September 2023 and 6 per cent above the 2019 figure.

Foreign student commencements were up 20 per cent on pre-pandemic levels but just 2 per cent on 2023.

Ramirez said the impacts of the policy changes of December 2023 and early 2024 had been realised about six months later, illustrating the “lagging effect” of new rules in a sector where course choices and visa applications occurred long in advance. The same thing would happen with MD111, because a “vast percentage” of students already had their visas when the new directive emerged a few days before Christmas.

“The effects are most likely to be seen in the second semester,” he said.

But Ramirez predicted worse visa delays under MD111 than the previous regime, ministerial direction 107 (MD107), which had pushed average processing times for the bulk of offshore higher education visas from around 18 to 41 days.

Institutions under their “thresholds” – 80 per cent of the indicative quotas assigned to them under the now defunct bill to cap foreign enrolments – could still expect visas for three-quarters of their students to be processed within two to three weeks. But universities and colleges that had reached these thresholds faced delays as long as 95 to 100 days.

This would entail a 5 to 10 per cent decrease in the overall number of new higher education students coming from overseas. The impacts would be uneven, with the longest delays experienced by universities already over their 80 per cent thresholds.

Such universities would focus on maximising their international education revenue and securing their existing applicants, rather than encouraging more students to apply. Their fees would rise by more than the average annual increase of about 5 per cent, and “early conversion scholarships” would incentivise students with offers of places to “confirm their acceptance as early as possible”.

Other universities would seek to increase their share of student numbers by minimising fee increases and using scholarships to “re-engage” markets that had been “severely affected” by MD107.

Ramirez said international education operators could expect a “polarising” narrative during a “difficult” federal election campaign. But its outcome would make little difference, with the new policy framework likely to prevail for at least a couple of years irrespective of the winner.

However, other developments – Trump administration policies and the weakening Australian economy – could play out in the sector’s favour.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com