Applications by foreign students to Australian universities, vocational colleges, and other higher-education institutions declined 40 percent last month, reports The Australian, a newspaper. Education experts blamed the drop on more-rigorous requirements for student visas. In addition, they said, a delay in the government’s announcement of which jobs are “priority skills” and could lead to permanent residency for non-Australians is a factor.
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4 Responses to International Applications to Australian Universities Plunge
22079340 - May 12, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Stricter student visa requirements might affect enrollments, but they wouldn’t affect applications to this degree. Given that the largest numbers of international students come from India and China, a more likely explanation for this decline is the recent resurgence of xenophobic violence against non-whitte foreign students and others in Australia.
sanjaykapur - May 13, 2010 at 7:58 am
It is much easier for education “experts” and the Australian news media to blame bureaucratic regulators rather than to confront the uncomfortable truth about the xenophobic tendencies of Australian society that has lead to a lot of violence directed at foreign students in the last year.
studyabroad - May 13, 2010 at 2:08 pm
When paying in India rupees, the Australian dollar rose 40% against the UK Pound. Tuition price, in home currency is perhaps a much greater factor than others. A high Aussie dollar and low Pound will drive many students attend mid-tier universities in the UK instead of down under.
vatican - May 14, 2010 at 12:55 am
You have no idea what you are writing about. The more rigorous visa requirement is put in place to stamp out fly-by-night educational operators who rip students off. Also, we know that not every international student is there for educational purposes. This is about being smart – attracting people who want to study and keeping at bay those who want waste their time and take up spaces at universities when those spaces could be given to students who actually cut the grades and want to study. I was an international student in Australia from 1993 until 2002 and in no way did I feel discriminated against. By the way, I asked my friend who is an Indian professor at one of the universities in Australia what the situation is – he says that the media loves to sensationalize incidents. So you guys can stop the xenophobia crap. I believe the Australian educational sector is competing with some really serious international players from New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, the UK, the US and many other European universities that are producing quality students. Unless the Australian universities take a serious look at their “let’s take in any Tom, Dick and Harry who applies’ strategy because the Federal government is reducing their funding (or so they claim), maybe they should be more stringent about giving out degrees, especially in their overseas programs. I also believe it’s also time for the market to re-adjust itself – there are a few dodgy universities (we know which ones they are, don’t we?) that have gone down the route of issuing degrees freely and willingly because they are lucrative. Now the whole industry suffers as a result as hundreds of thousands of international students can’t get the jobs when they enter the job market and eventually the word will get out – exactly which universities are dodgy. Then again history has a way of repeating itself – people who are not careful to examine the quality of the institutions they are going to will tend to repeat the same mistakes again.