Who wins and who loses if Australia goes ahead with overseas cap?

Australia’s proposed caps on universities’ overseas student numbers are unlikely to achieve their policy rationales of freeing up housing and redistributing international enrolments more equitably. But experts are split on the damage they will cause to the country’s top service export industry.

While most universities have not divulged their draft caps for 2025, the institutions most disadvantaged are the top-ranked Group of Eight (Go8) institutions – particularly its big Sydney and Melbourne members – and some second-tier universities that had banked on international education to fund their post-Covid recovery.

The caps will have little impact on other metropolitan universities, whose quotas are in line with their international enrolment projections next year. And some regional universities, long sidelined by city-leaning foreign students, could potentially benefit from caps that are considerably higher than this year’s international admissions.

“We have been presented an opportunity which we would very much like to take up,” said Chris Moran, vice-chancellor of the University of New England (UNE), where foreigners make up about 5 per cent of enrolments – a mere fraction of the sector average of 29 per cent, let alone the 50-odd per cent at overseas student magnets such as the University of Sydney.

Almost nobody believes this opportunity will come about, however. “Few students who want to attend high-prestige universities or…live in large cities will go to lower prestige or regional universities instead,” Australian National University (ANU) analyst Andrew Norton noted in The Conversation. “They just won’t come to Australia.”

Consequently, rich city universities could incur a lot of pain while their country cousins reap precious little commensurate gain. The Go8 has confirmed an aggregate quota of 61,000 places for new overseas students next year, down 27 per cent from the 83,000 or so foreigners admitted to member institutions in 2024.

The financial hit to top-tier institutions could be massive if the bill to legislate the caps passes parliament. In 2023, the latest year for which figures are available, Go8 members earned more than A$19 billion (£9.8 billion) from overseas students’ fees.

Unsurprisingly, the group is campaigning vigorously for the bill’s defeat. “The Go8 encourages the Senate in the strongest possible terms to not allow the government to bully it into passing [the] legislation,” said chief executive Vicki Thomson.

Meanwhile, data disagreements could provide an avenue for Go8 institutions to have their caps increased, if not erased. The two members with the highest proportions of overseas students, Sydney and Melbourne, have both disputed the data used by the Education Department to set their caps.

The department has scheduled meetings with universities and their representative bodies to “discuss” the draft caps. Western Sydney University vice-chancellor George Williams said he did not expect significant adjustments to the quotas. “I see no willingness to change the formula,” he said.

The formula is especially punitive to institutions where 2023 international enrolments comprised more than 37 per cent of their total cohorts – a category likely to include the six richest Go8 members – and where numbers of new overseas students have increased sharply since pre-pandemic times.

Such universities will be able to retain only half of the growth in international commencements between 2019 and 2023, let alone any additional recruitment this year.

The most disadvantaged institution appears to be UNSW Sydney, which experienced easily the highest growth in 2023 international student recruitment of any New South Wales university, according to a report from the state’s auditor general. Its full-time overseas enrolments increased by more than 2,000 that year – more than double the growth margin at Sydney.

UNSW was also the only Go8 member to record a deficit in 2023. In a statement, it said it was “deeply disappointed” with the proposed cuts to international commencements. It has highlighted how international education income is used to bridge funding gaps for domestic health education and to underwrite services for socio-economically disadvantaged Australian students.

Sydney’s vice-chancellor, Mark Scott, bristled at a recent Senate committee hearing scrutinising the bill when shadow education minister Sarah Henderson said he was “gold-plating” his university with international education revenue.

He cited the Sydney Biomedical Accelerator, on which the university is spending A$650 million. “Have we invested funding we’ve got from international students into that? Yes. Do we have any regrets around that? Emphatically no.”

But do the caps pose a major threat to such funding flows? Some commentators suspect not. Ms Henderson said Go8 universities had experienced a 34 per cent surge in their foreign enrolments this year, and the proposals would merely set them back to 2023 levels.

The eight Go8 members achieved record or near record revenues that year, notching a combined surplus of a billion dollars compared with a combined deficit of almost three-quarters of a billion dollars across the other 30 publicly funded universities.

Immigration expert Abul Rizvi said it was hard to judge whether the overall cap proposed for higher education – 145,000 new overseas students across the publicly funded universities, and another 30,000 at private universities and independent colleges – was higher or lower than 2023 commencement figures, because a definitional change made precise data comparisons impossible.

Nevertheless, Dr Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration, said the move should not be seen as a “slashing” of international student numbers, as some media have reported. “There is a lot of panic on the caps, and they are a poor policy tool; but the stock of students and temporary graduates in Australia will keep growing,” he said.

However, ANU’s Professor Norton said universities’ actual international enrolments were likely to “significantly” undercut their caps, partly because they will recruit conservatively to avoid incurring penalties. They also face a “stranded places problem” because possible rules – limiting foreign enrolments to fields of Australian national need, for example – could prove unpalatable to foreign students.

Professor Norton has also highlighted the cumulative impact of at least nine other recent international education policy changes that have amplified visa rejection rates and processing delays, increased financial and English language demands on students and produced the world’s highest visa application fees.

Neil Fitzroy, Australasian managing director of the Oxford International Education Group, said it might not “matter” that some universities’ caps gave them the “headspace” for more foreign enrolments. “The world has a message that Australia’s closed for business. Are they even considering Australia?”

Mr Fitzroy said Canada, where foreign students’ interest had plunged following the application of provincial-level enrolment caps, was unlikely to be able to accommodate students deterred by Australia’s policy changes.

But they could be attracted to the UK, notwithstanding recent downturns in the country’s popularity, after the Sunak government backtracked on plans to scrap post-study work rights and the new education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, broadcasted a welcome message to international students.

Other likely beneficiaries included “secondary” and non-anglophone education destinations such as New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai, Germany and France.

“Is this a fundamental shift of market share of the big four? Are [they] collectively…going to lose out to emerging destination markets?” Mr Fitzroy said.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com