Fine print of Australian caps ‘a PR disaster in waiting’

Operational features of Australia’s proposed international enrolment caps will “test” students’ loyalties and could lead to a “public relations disaster”, analysts have warned.

International education specialist Neil Fitzroy said abrupt college closures were “inevitable” over the next six to 12 months, as visa policy changes left cash-strapped institutions without desperately needed tuition fees.

Students stranded by such events would normally be rescued by Australia’s Tuition Protection Service (TPS), which identifies alternative institutions where displaced students can complete their courses. But TPS placements are not among the groups exempted from counting towards colleges’ caps.

“Unless we have special dispensation for them, we’ve potentially got a PR disaster here,” said Mr Fitzroy, Australasian managing director of the Oxford International Education Group. “We’re going to struggle to find anyone able and willing to take them.”

He said the caps also risked undermining onshore pathways from bachelor’s to master’s courses. Students who wanted to change institutions for postgraduate study would be considered brand new students in regard to the caps, and might not be able to find universities that could accommodate them.

The same could apply to students who completed preparatory courses at universities’ partner colleges – including university-owned colleges – before entering the universities’ full degree programmes. Restricted by their caps, the universities may not be able to offer them places.

Mr Fitzroy said the Covid-19 border closures had revealed how readily students, parents and agents – even in countries where Australia had long been considered the “preferred destination” – could switch their allegiances.

“The students, the agents, the twinning arrangements, the articulations – basically the entire market moved away from us to find a viable destination. We’re only just re-establishing Australia after Covid, and we’re basically self-imposing what’s essentially another major event that pushes that market sentiment away from Australia.”

In a blog, Australian National University policy expert Andrew Norton listed a string of operational issues caused by the system’s design. They included definitional problems, difficulties in legislating the exemptions, timing issues in the reallocation of unused places, and a clause allowing eleventh-hour cancellations of students’ enrolments.

Professor Norton said the caps’ counting mechanism would incentivise institutions to retain each overseas student for as long as possible, creating a “qualification level bias” favouring undergraduate study. Such a bias could conflict with global trends that see students increasingly heading abroad at postgraduate stage.

Immigration expert Abul Rizvi said the institutional incentive to keep current students could have both positive and negative consequences. “Offering a better student experience to retain students would be a positive,” he noted. “But it could also lead to even greater levels of soft marking.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com