A Senate committee scrutinising Labor’s international student cap has recommended the bill be passed with significant amendments, including removing the ability to set course-level enrolment limits.
The bill would provide new ministerial powers for the commonwealth to manage higher education applications, including the ability to suspend and cancel specified courses, to facilitate a 30% reduction in international students from 2025.
The report, released on Wednesday night, estimated the bill would have a financial impact of $7.9m in 2023–24.
The education and employment committee noted “concerns” from a number of participants regarding enrolment limits being set at the course level and that there should be “greater consultation and transparency around the operation of the legislation”.
It recommended the minister be required to contact providers, ESOS agencies and the immigration minister before setting future limits, and for the bill to be amended to exempt specific classes of students, including by citizenship, from enrolment limits in instruments and notices.
“The committee acknowledges the concerns raised by some education providers, particularly larger universities, regarding the proposed enrolment and course limits for international students,” the report read.
“There were strong concerns raised regarding the practicality of imposing and managing course level caps including from university representatives.”
The committee, chaired by the Labor senator Tony Sheldon, received almost 200 submissions and heard from dozens of witnesses over four days of hearings, the vast majority of which said the caps were punitive, poorly designed and would have a significant financial impact.
Guardian Australia understands the report was intended to be debated in parliament this week but will instead be raised at the start of November.
The Greens deputy leader and spokesperson for higher education, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, called for the government to withdraw its bill.
“Despite overwhelming opposition, Labor is charging ahead with their politically motivated international student caps that will devastate the tertiary education sector,” she said.
“We know these caps will lead to job losses, we know these caps will trash Australia’s international education reputation, we know these caps will lead to dire consequences, and yet Labor is still persisting with this wrecking-ball of a policy.
“Labor needs to stop demonising international students for their own housing policy failures. They’ve been long used as cash cows to make up for funding cuts to universities, and now they are disgracefully being scapegoated too.”
The peak body for the sector, Universities Australia, warned in its submission that the proposed student caps would “reshape Australia’s international education sector in a way that … risks our national prosperity and the viability of our universities”. It has estimated up to 14,000 job losses if the caps go ahead.
“Universities have come to rely on international student fees to fund their operations due to a shortfall in government funding for research, teaching and campus infrastructure,” its chief executive officer, Luke Sheehy, said in his submission, adding the caps were an overreach amid existing interventions to crack down on the sector stemming from a review into migration.
Sheehy noted that as a result of the government’s ministerial direction 107, implemented in December last year to reduce visa approvals among “high-risk” universities, 55,372 fewer visas had been granted in the six months to June – representing a 32% year-on-year drop, or $4bn in financial losses.
The report acknowledged this, recommending ministerial direction 107 be removed “upon royal assent to the legislative amendments”.
The cap allocations, released by the Department of Education in September, showed 15 of Australia’s universities were set to have their student allocations slashed compared with their 2023 enrolments, while 23 would be able to enrol more international students.
The increases, though, were modest, not exceeding more than a few hundred additional foreign students.
Private providers would also be hard hit. The chief executive of the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia, Troy Williams, told the inquiry damage to the sector would take “years to repair” and be a “job killer”, estimating the caps would cause thousands of job losses alongside campus closures.
“Some … providers with a track record of delivering high-quality outcomes for students are allocated just three or four students under this bill,” he said late last month.
“At the same time … a provider with no history of delivery for the past one to four years in some cases might receive an allocation of thirty. This is not just unfair; it’s bizarre and illogical.”
A National Tertiary Education Union analysis of the caps similarly found it would have an uneven impact on providers, with some universities that didn’t have a significant spike in international students following Covid to seemingly arbitrarily receive “locked in” low enrolment limits.
Among them were regional universities Charles Sturt University, Central Queensland University and Southern Cross University, which would be barred from returning to their 2019 intake levels despite the Universities Accord recommending investing in the regions to lift enrolments of disadvantaged Australians.
“The current formula effectively throws a hard brake on revenue for many institutions,” the National Tertiary Education Union submission read. “Unfortunately, it is the union’s experience that the first, and indeed only, lever that university managements choose to use in such circumstances is to shed staff.”
