Andrew Norton on the Albanian government’s interventionist policy to reduce the number of foreign students

Migration has become a major battleground between the government and the opposition. Although they have different policies, each side focuses on international students in their enrollment cut plans.

The government will apply the limits set by the minister on the number of foreign students at individual universities, with some relief for institutions investing in new student housing.

Andrew Norton, Professor of Higher Education Policy Practice at ANU, joined the podcast to analyze this policy.

It emphasizes how broad the minister’s prerogatives will be under this policy:

The government has announced that it will give the minister the power to set caps on the number of international students, and he will be able to do this depending on the educational institution, field of study, location and any other issues he chooses. Therefore, very broad powers for the minister to decide how big the entire industry will be and how big each supplier can be.

College locations will be relevant to their likely limits:

I think it will be more difficult for some than for others, and the reason for this is (…) the housing crisis in large cities, especially in Melbourne and Sydney.

This means there will be significant caps, likely in the Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas, and perhaps none at all in regional universities because they don’t have the same problems. But of course we know that only a relatively small number of international students want to study in Australia’s regions.

The government continues to combat ghost universities, which challenge government attempts to curb them:

A ghost school is essentially a college set up, possibly in collaboration with a migration agent. Students don’t want to learn. They just want to work in Australia, so they have semi-fake enrollments in a religious college that allows them to work full-time.

There are approximately 800 such private vocational schools that can accept foreign students. I think most of them are honest, but there are probably dozens that aren’t, which is why the government is trying to crack down on them and essentially eliminate them from the market.

They are masters at finding loopholes, and one of the things that the government is currently doing is basically pausing their registration for about a year to try to deal with the loopholes we have now.

The university fee structure, changed under Scott Morrison to increase the cost of the humanities, has not changed under Labor; Norton gives us the reason:

It’s hard to do this in a budget-neutral way. I think the coalition adopted this policy into a trap. So they charge about $16,000 a year to get an art degree, but only about $4,500 a year for nursing or teaching, so for this budget to be neutral they would have to raise fees for teaching and nursing, which is obviously not a good political idea when you’re trying to get people to take these courses. And that’s why I think they became paralyzed.