In its draft of Australia’s International Education and Skills Strategic Framework, the government wants to do more to encourage international students to enrol in courses to meet Australia’s skills shortages, claiming that this will avoid graduates becoming ‘permanently temporary’. This two-part piece draws on my response to the consultation question, including repeating mistakes of previous governments, inconsistent messaging, as well as a paper by the ANU Migration Hub this week calling ‘permanently temporary’ migration a myth.
The consultation question in the draft of Australia’s International Education and Skills Strategic Framework asks how the government should determine which courses are best aligned to Australia’s skills needs.
Incentives and past mistakes
It is likely that incentives would need to be offered to encourage students to take up courses that meet Australia’s skills needs, and this is where the government must learn from past mistakes.
In 2010, the then Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Evans said “Australia’s migration program cannot be determined by the courses studied by international students”. Senator Evans’ comment came about following an explicit policy of the then government to break the nexus between student visas and permanent residency.
The government should recall the rise in private colleges offering hairdressing and cookery in 2007-2009, following these professions being placed on the Migration Occupation in Demand List (MODL). This subsequently led to a spike in permanent residency applications from graduates of these courses, but this did not lead to solving the skills shortage in these fields (for reasons that we address in part two).
When the government introduced a new migration policy in 2010, international students were cautioned against choosing courses for a migration outcome because the MODL was reviewed annually and would change in response to Australia’s changing economic and labour market needs.
In the ANU Migration Hub paper released this week, Understanding Australian Migration 2024 (TKN 190624), author Emeritus Professor Peter McDonald, reminds us that net overseas migration (NOM) was well above the desired program level from 2006 to 2009 because of this policy setting.
The current government’s Migration Strategy aims to reduce NOM and the Genuine Student requirement for a student visa contradicts the ability of a student to say that they want to work in Australia. Aligning courses with Australia’s skills needs sends inconsistent messaging to prospective students that we want them to study these courses to migrate, but we also don’t want them to.
Market-based industry
International education is a global market-based industry, with students exercising free will in which courses and countries they choose to study in. Restricting the offering of courses, especially to those that align with Australia’s skills needs, will not be a case of ‘build it and they will come’.
Only approximately 16 per cent of international students become permanent residents. This means that the vast majority will return home to work in their own country, meaning that Australia’s skills needs are meaningless to them.
If the courses that students want to do are not offered in Australia, then they will go somewhere else, and there are multiple other options. There are the traditional English-speaking competitor markets such as the US and UK, but a recent study done by Studyportals found there has also been a rise in English-taught programs in non-traditional competitor markets.
As respected higher education leader Andrew Norton has said “people who will spend most of their working lives in non-Australian labour markets should be free to take courses that reflect their own interests and career plans.”
Part two of this piece addresses the issue of ‘permanently temporary’ and what the government could be doing instead of focusing on courses.
