Quality metrics ignored in Australian international student caps

Australia’s Department of Education has ignored its own quality metrics in setting enrolment caps purportedly designed to ensure quality.

Data from the government-commissioned Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (Qilt) surveys have not been used in calculating the caps, which will apply from January if the underpinning legislation passes parliament this month.

Colleges with some of the best quality scores face some of the most restrictive quotas. Leaders Institute, which claimed the third-highest overall undergraduate satisfaction rating in the latest Student Experience Survey (SES), would be limited to 50 new overseas students – less than one-fifth of its 2024 commencements and far below the 1,200 international enrolments permitted under the Commonwealth Register of Institutions and Courses for Overseas Students (Cricos).

Fourteen other non-university institutions with significant international enrolments outperformed every public university in the SES, with scores about 10 percentage points higher. Their average caps are 16 per cent of their Cricos limits, compared with 29 per cent at public universities.

Alphacrucis University College, one of the 14, faces a cap 23 per cent below its 2024 commencements and 94 per cent below its Cricos approval. Alphacrucis economics professor Paul Oslington said the government had chosen a “strange and inefficient way” of designing caps to safeguard student experience. “If it was a quality issue, then you’d regulate quality.”

Assistant education minister Anthony Chisholm told a Senate estimates hearing that the caps would ensure that “people who come here have a good experience”. The Department of Education did not say why student experience data had been ignored in the caps’ calculation.

The Perth-based Engineering Institute of Technology won this year’s Western Australian export award for education. Its courses are accredited by professional bodies around the world and it has self-accrediting authority in Australia. Its proposed 2025 cap of 160 new international students is about one-fifth of its Cricos capacity.

Dean of engineering Steve Mackay said the college had “invested millions” in new or upgraded campuses in Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne. He supported international enrolment caps because “the Australian community doesn’t want unlimited immigration” but said he would have preferred a higher quota. “We’ve got all these campuses that we’ve outfitted with labs, and we can’t use them now.”

The Holmes Institute achieved better overall SES scores than all but seven public universities. Chief executive Stephen Nagle said the institution had capacity for 8,800 overseas students but faced a cap of 980 international commencements next year. He said teaching quality and overall satisfaction were the key consumer metrics. “We don’t get students unless we deliver a quality product, so we focus on the Qilt surveys.”

Policy analyst Neil Fitzroy said regulatory signifiers of quality, including long registrations and university college status, had not been factored into the calculations. “Instead, a simplistic spreadsheet formula – using 2023 enrolments as the baseline – perversely rewards institutions that recruited large volumes in that year, blind to any quality or integrity metrics.”

Mr Fitzroy, from the Oxford International Education Group, said seven colleges that had been newly registered over the past 12 months faced caps of zero international student commencements next year. Most had Cricos approval for hundreds.

He said college operators typically spent more than A$5 million (£2.6 million) developing their nascent businesses to registration stage and paying “hefty” fees to the regulator. “At the sole discretion of the minister, these colleges can’t recruit a single overseas student.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com