There is a well-worn saying, often attributed to Otto von Bismarck, that the wise learn from the mistakes of others.
It is a useful thought for Australia’s international education sector right now.
Governments are entitled to change policy. They are also entitled to pursue a more tightly regulated, better-targeted, higher-quality international education system.
The question is whether Australia is paying enough attention to what has happened in other major study destinations when governments have taken similar steps.
Australia is not operating in isolation.
The UK, Canada and the United States have all tightened aspects of their international education and migration settings in recent years. International student numbers have since come under pressure, and students have increasingly shown they are willing to look elsewhere when the combination of cost, visa settings, study options, and post-study opportunities becomes less attractive.
That should matter to Australia.
The international student market is not captive. Students have choices, and those choices can change surprisingly quickly.
The UK provides one example worth watching.
Changes introduced in 2024 significantly restricted many international students’ ability to bring family members to the UK. Subsequent analysis has pointed to substantial declines in applications from some key markets, including Nigeria and India.
The precise causes of those declines are, of course, more complicated than any single policy. But the family visa changes were clearly part of a much broader shift in the UK’s international education settings.
And once a destination starts to lose its appeal, winning students back is not necessarily as simple as reversing the policy that contributed to the decline.
That is the part Australia should be thinking about.
Australia’s current environment involves a number of changes happening at the same time. Visa processing and refusal rates, restrictions around accompanying family members, changes to course and provider settings, increased scrutiny of applications and broader efforts to manage international student numbers are all reshaping the proposition being presented to prospective students.
Each policy can have its own rationale.
The bigger question is what happens when a student experiences them as a single proposition.
A prospective student does not necessarily distinguish between the Department of Home Affairs, education regulators, universities, governments and individual policy announcements.
They simply ask a relatively straightforward question:
Is Australia still a place where I want to study?
That is where reputation becomes important.
International education is built over decades. Australia has spent years establishing itself as a trusted destination for students and families. Universities, colleges, agents, governments and industry have collectively built relationships in markets around the world.
That reputation can be strengthened relatively slowly.
It can also be weakened relatively quickly.
And even if policies are eventually reversed, the market may not immediately reverse with them.
Students who have already decided to study elsewhere will have moved on. Agents may have redirected their attention to other destinations. Parents may have become less confident about Australia. Providers that have exited the market may not return.
For some parts of the sector, particularly those operating on tight margins, there may not even be a business left to revive.
This is why international examples matter.
It is reasonable for governments to argue that short-term disruption is necessary to achieve longer-term objectives. It is also reasonable to ask whether the available evidence from other countries supports that proposition.
Have tighter settings delivered the outcomes governments expected?
Have they improved quality without unnecessarily reducing demand?
Have they addressed the problems they were designed to address?
And perhaps most importantly, what unintended consequences have emerged along the way?
These are not arguments against regulation or reform. In fact, a properly functioning international education system needs both.
But regulation has consequences, and international students respond to those consequences.
Australia should be particularly conscious of this because we are competing in a global market. The student who decides Australia is too difficult is not necessarily giving up on international education.
They may simply be choosing Canada, the UK, the US, New Zealand, Ireland or another emerging destination instead.
There is also a timing issue.
It can take years to understand the full impact of a major policy change. Enrolment declines may be visible relatively quickly, while reputational effects, changes in agent behaviour and shifts in student preferences can take considerably longer to emerge.
By the time the full consequences become obvious in the data, some of the damage may already be difficult to unwind.
Australia therefore has an opportunity to do something relatively simple.
Look around.
The experiences of other major destinations provide a natural policy laboratory. Some have already tested what happens when governments make international education harder to access, reduce migration pathways or change the conditions attached to studying overseas.
Australia does not need to repeat every experiment to find out what happens.
The objective should not be to protect international education from sensible reform. Nor should it be to assume every decline in student numbers is evidence of bad policy.
It should be to make sure that, in pursuing a better international education system, Australia does not accidentally make itself a less attractive international education destination.
Because the real mistake would not be changing policy.
It would be failing to learn from what happens when others do the same.
