Record student numbers arriving in Australia, with more than 700,000 student-visa holders in the country at the end of February.
The pandemic and associated border closures hit the Australian post-secondary education sector hard, but clearly those days are far behind us, with the sector catching up over the last 12 months.
However, this growth is not without problems, particularly with housing, as many thousands of students are competing with permanent residents for scarce homes. There are also growing concerns with congestion and demand on essential services, with most of these students settling in the capital cities.
Late in 2023, the federal government put in place measures to limit the growth of student numbers, such as lifting English language requirements, cracking down on ‘high risk’ education providers, and introducing a new ‘genuine student test’ to weed out the job seekers from the real students.
International students can offer great advantages for any host nation, but we do need to mitigate the costs, especially when numbers are so high.
Read more in Guardian Australia (2 April 2024).
This update is part of the April 2024 edition of Future Perfect enewsletter.
You can read past editions of Future Perfect on our enews homepage or stay across all our updates on LinkedIn.
Future Perfect is distributed to IEU members in the private post-secondary education sector two times per year.
