The Koala’s friends at Studymove are conducting two upcoming sector briefings to examine the latest international student trends in Australia and New Zealand, with a particular focus on changing source markets, student demand, visa outcomes, and what the data could mean for the year ahead.
International education markets are rarely static, but 2026 is proving particularly difficult to read.
Across Australia and New Zealand, providers are operating in an environment shaped by changing visa settings, shifting student demand, rising competition between destinations and increasingly unpredictable source-market behaviour.
That makes the latest data more than just a snapshot of where the sector has been. It may provide some important clues about where international education is heading next.
Two upcoming online sessions will take a closer look at those trends, with separate briefings focused on Australia and New Zealand.
Australia: a closer look at the first half of 2026
The Mid-Year Data Review: 2026 International Student Recruitment Trends, taking place on 20 August, will examine how Australia’s international higher education market has performed through the first half of the year.
The session will look beyond headline enrolment numbers to examine what is happening across Australia’s key source markets and whether student demand is beginning to shift in meaningful ways.
One area of particular interest will be the impact of changes in student visa rejection rates.
Visa outcomes have become an increasingly important part of the recruitment equation. For students, agents and providers, the question is no longer simply whether Australia remains an attractive study destination, but whether students from particular markets can successfully navigate the visa process.
That makes changes in rejection rates potentially significant indicators of how recruitment patterns may develop through the remainder of 2026.
The session will also consider emerging shifts in student demand and what the first half of the year might tell us about the second half of 2026 and into 2027.
For providers and agents trying to make decisions in an increasingly volatile market, that forward-looking perspective could be particularly useful.
The Australia session is being held on 20 August.
Register for the Australia session
New Zealand: is the recovery becoming sustainable?
A second session, The Recovery of International Education, will turn the focus to New Zealand on 25 August.
New Zealand’s international education sector has been steadily rebuilding following the disruption of recent years, but the headline recovery only tells part of the story.
The composition of new student cohorts is changing, and that creates both opportunities and questions for the sector.
The session will examine the latest data to identify where the strongest opportunities may be emerging for New Zealand universities, including which source markets are driving the recovery.
Growth driven by a small number of markets can produce impressive headline figures while leaving a sector exposed to changes in policy, economic conditions or student sentiment in those markets. A broader and more diverse recovery may provide a stronger foundation for sustainable growth.
The discussion will therefore go beyond identifying where students are coming from to consider how sustainable the current trajectory may be.
For New Zealand, which has been rebuilding its international education proposition while competing with increasingly aggressive destination markets, understanding the composition of growth may be just as important as the growth itself.
The New Zealand session is being held on 25 August.
Register for the New Zealand session
Reading the signals
Taken together, the two sessions offer a timely opportunity to compare what is happening across two neighbouring markets that compete for many of the same students but are operating under very different policy and market conditions.
For Australia, the immediate question is whether the changes seen during the first half of 2026 represent temporary volatility or the beginning of a more significant shift in recruitment patterns.
For New Zealand, the question is whether the recovery is broad enough and sufficiently diversified to be sustained.
In both cases, the data will be important. But perhaps more important will be what providers, agents and policymakers choose to do with it.
