Labor MP Julian Hill has called for “nuclear” reforms to weed out poor quality vocational educators who he says are exploiting the system as a “low-rent work visa”.
He has proposed suspending international student intakes for low quality courses and preventing internal assessments.
Hill, who was previously the executive director of international education in the Victorian government, is co-convener of the ministerial advisory committee interrogating international education.
The parliamentary committee has heard shocking allegations of vocational education and training (VET) providers “gaming the system” and working with unregulated international education agents to steal students from prestigious public institutions for massive commissions, sell work visas and open “ghost schools” where students don’t attend classes but still receive degrees.
Speaking in parliament on Monday, Hill said the international student sector was vital to Australia’s prosperity but radical thinking was needed to clean up the sector.
“The vast majority of the sector do wonderful things but a minority of students – mainly in the bottom end of private VET – are only here to work not study,” he said.
“Our student visa must not be used as a low-rent work visa.”
Hill said Australia’s future success relied upon quality education that had been compromised after “a decade of drift and neglect” and the sector’s social license needed to be restored.
He floated four options for reform, termed “nuclear” in private conversations.
Among them was revamping the entire accreditation framework for private VET providers, to separate training from assessment as is done in year 12 certificates, forcing providers to re-apply for licenses and suspending enrolments in “low-value” courses, and banning the payment of education agent commissions for onshore students.
“Most providers do good things but there are a significant minority that are dodgy, selling work visas,” he said.
“In education, ASQA [Australian Skills Quality Authority] inspect the paperwork and use that as a proxy for quality.
“Good quality private providers are despairing. They report that dodgy providers just get the students in, pop the exam answers on the board and the students write them down and go back to work.”
Hill said dodgy providers couldn’t be weeded out unless students were properly tested and the bar was raised to become an assessment provider.
“If we … force the higher risk private VET providers to have their students externally assessed, then it would shock the system,” he said.
“ASQA could rapidly put colleges selling dodgy qualifications out of business.”
With concern over the rapid post-pandemic growth in international student numbers, Hill said suspending enrolments to courses with non-vocational outcomes in which vast numbers of VET students were enrolled was “controversial” but “food for thought”.
“What benefit is Australia getting from tens of thousands of international students enrolled in certificates and diplomas in marketing, leadership and business?” he said.
“There are few if any migration pathways. The courses are cheap. And too many students are working not studying.”
The inquiry has heard sweeping allegations of education agents acting as a Ponzi scheme by taking commissions of up to 50% to enrol students in courses and funnelling them to lower quality private providers once arriving onshore.
The broadly unregulated sector acts as a middle man to advise and recruit students from overseas.
Hill said “rapacious onshore agents” were “destroying the integrity of the sector” by “bribing and stealing students from universities to low-cost VET providers with kickbacks, discounts and incentives”.
Hill said attempts at regulation had failed in the past because “it’s expensive and complex” but parliament could ban the payment of commissions for onshore students entirely to wipe out the intermediaries.
“Regulating agents has become a question of ‘how and when’ not ‘if’,” he said. “Time to prune the tree to save the tree?”
