New directive ‘could short-change’ university student visa caps

Australia’s Department of Home Affairs has brushed off fears that the latest measure to curb overseas student inflows could leave institutions worse off than they would have been under the stalled international enrolment caps.

The new mechanism, “ministerial direction 111”, does not cap student numbers. Rather, it slows down visa processing for institutions whose overseas commencements have reached a “threshold” of 80 per cent of their quotas under the now-defunct caps proposal.

Consultant and former regulator Claire Field said the new directive offered “a more level playing field” than ministerial direction 107, which it had replaced. But she warned that visa delays could continue because more applications would now be given “high priority” treatment, increasing average processing time frames.

Delays could be acute for applications deemed low priority because institutions had reached their 80 per cent thresholds, Ms Field said.

“With no details on whether the department has hired more student visa processing staff, many providers could end 2025 with 80 per cent or less of their original student cap,” she warned.

The Department of Home Affairs did not say whether it would devote more staff to the student visa caseload, insisting that resources would be allocated “flexibly” to meet government priorities.

But a spokeswoman said the “on-hand” stack of offshore student visa applications had halved in recent months, leaving the department “well placed” to process visas for foreigners starting courses early next year.

However, the Group of Eight said the government had “shifted the goal posts yet again” by adopting the “bewildering” 80 per cent threshold.

“Our universities have set budgets based on a number provided to them by government several months ago,” said chief executive Vicki Thomson. “With just days before the end of the year, and with little apparent rationale, this number has shifted again.

“This backdoor to caps…fails to address the structural funding issues our universities face and will lead to even greater confusion for our international students.”

Other representative groups greeted the new directive more warmly. Universities Australia branded it a “commonsense decision” that was “desperately needed” to deliver “certainty and stability”.

The Innovative Research Universities group called it “a positive step toward a better and fairer system. The government must now ensure that visa processing capacity is in place,” said executive director Paul Harris.

Peter Hurley, director of the Mitchell Institute for Education and Health Policy at Victoria University, said the government was “using processing times to throttle the number of international students coming into the country”.

He said the new arrangement was “a workaround that replaces another workaround” and would eventually have to be replaced, because it did not give the government sufficient control over migrant numbers.

Former immigration bureaucrat Abul Rizvi said the new approach would have no effect on net migration because it would not influence how many applicants received visas – unless the intent was to create a “backlog” of offshore student visa applications.

Deliberately creating such a backlog would be “unlawful”, Dr Rizvi said. “Each visa application has a legal right to a timely decision.”

Ms Field said that even if visa processing time frames improved, applications still risked rejection. “Just because a provider’s visas are given higher priority…it won’t mean any lessening of integrity checks.

“Lots of visa applications were rejected in 2024 because providers didn’t understand the requirements,” she said. While an early year “spike” in refusals had eased, the new directive still required “high-quality applications”.

Ms Field said the “clear winners” from the new arrangements were public training institutions, or TAFEs, whose students’ applications would receive priority processing irrespective of how many applicants had already been granted visas.

The Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia said this was a slap in the face for its members, with many already facing an “existential threat” to the viability of their businesses.

“The policy openly discriminates against non-government providers,” said chief executive Troy Williams. “It…appears driven by ideological opposition to non-government providers rather than principles of fairness and equity.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com