Big fee hikes in store for Australia’s international students

International students’ fees are set to rise by a record margin across Australia as institutions adapt to the inevitability of overseas enrolment caps.

Consultancy firm Studymove predicts average tuition fee increases of 6.2 per cent next year, up from 5.6 per cent in 2018 and 1.5 per cent in 2022.

Studymove director Keri Ramirez said his preliminary analysis had uncovered fee rises of between 6 per cent and 8 per cent at more than half of Australia’s universities. “[It is] the highest increase in annual average fees that we have ever recorded,” he told a webinar.

“We are pretty much in emergency mode, and revenue is what matters.”

He said the proposed caps had forced the sector into two distinct camps, as administrators braced for the change. About 60 per cent of universities would retain the latitude to increase international enrolments and were focused on boosting their market share – through mechanisms such as scholarships – as they strived to meet their quotas.

The remaining 40 per cent of “cap-constrained” institutions would have to reduce their onshore overseas student numbers and were intent on maximising income while pursuing alternative approaches such as online and transnational education.

“Half of universities are increasing their fees by 6 per cent or more,” Mr Ramirez said. “Is the market going to be able to cope with that? We don’t know.”

The webinar explored the impacts of international education crackdown a year after the government foreshadowed policy changes last October. Mr Ramirez said educators had initially expected a focus on integrity issues amid moves to “prune the system”.

Instead, the government had slashed enrolments with a “chainsaw”. Over the following 10 months, student visa issuance had decreased by about 38 per cent, or 180,000, compared with the equivalent period in 2022-23.

Visa grants had decreased by one-quarter for higher education, one-half for English language study and two-thirds for vocational training, he said.

Mr Ramirez said the government had gone “too far” by unleashing multiple policy changes before enough time had elapsed to assess earlier reforms. He said the impacts of the biggest change to date, the reprioritisation of visa processing under last December’s ministerial direction 107, had taken months to materialise.

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Foreign student commencements had continued to grow, rising by 11 per cent in the first half of 2024 compared with the equivalent period of 2023, before declining by the same margin in the second half of this year.

Mr Ramirez said that if the government revoked ministerial direction 107 at the end of the year – as it has promised to do if the enrolment caps legislation passes parliament – educators could expect harsh visa delays and rejections to persist well into 2025.

For that reason, many universities would not be able to enrol as many foreign students as their caps allowed, he warned.

Meanwhile, a separate study has endorsed the government’s mid-year move to stamp out “visa hopping” by forbidding foreign graduates from lodging onshore applications for student visas following the expiry of their post-study work permits.

Research by the e61 Institute economics thinktank found that visa hoppers earned 20 per cent less than other graduate visa holders, on average, and worked in lower-skilled occupations.

Research manager Silvia Griselda said banning the practice was unlikely to cost Australia high-skilled migrants and would boost the proportion of international graduates who became permanent residents.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com