Under changes announced in Labor’s overhaul of the migration system, designed to weed out applicants using the student visa scheme as a backdoor to gain work rights, foreign students will no longer be penalised for revealing a desire to emigrate to Australia in their visa application.

In a document sent to the international education sector on Friday outlining details of the reforms, the Department of Home Affairs informed industry leaders that the transition from the Genuine Temporary Entrant requirement to a new Genuine Student Test will take place on March 23.

The test will ask international students direct questions about their links to Australia, for an “explanation of their choice of course” and the benefits the course will provide them, replacing a requirement to write a 300-word statement. Students will also be asked for details on the visa type they currently hold, their reasons for applying for a student visa, and their study history.

The change comes as the sector’s peak bodies prepare to meet on Wednesday to discuss the impacts of a raft of integrity reforms targeting the sector, as part of a push from the Albanese government to halve net migration in the next two years. 

Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia chief executive Troy Williams has criticised the government for introducing the changes with just over a week’s notice, accusing Labor of introducing “punitive regulations”.

“ITECA members were informed of this implementation date on March 15, an eight-day period in which to get ready for implementation of one of the most significant changes to the student visa framework in more than eight years,” he said.

Mr Williams said the change, which was one of a suite of reforms announced under the Migration Strategy in December, was an attempt by the government to address the “regulatory failure” after it allowed a record number of international students to enter the country to address crippling labour shortages in the wake of the pandemic.

“To deal with this regulatory failure, the government is implementing additional and more punitive regulations,” he said. “Red tape sales must be going through the roof in Canberra.”

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has sought to bring down the number of temporary migrants by tackling integrity issues with the international student visa by cracking down on students whose main reason for coming to Australia was not study, known as “non-genuine students”.

“A sector-appointed special working group was set up months ago to advise on these changes, which involved broader consultation across the sector,” a spokesman for Ms O’Neil said.

“We make no apology for working with the sector to end rorts and reintroduce integrity to our higher education system.”

International Education Association of Australia CEO Phil Honeywood said he was broadly supportive of the reforms, which would boost the government’s efforts to attract high-quality international students by no longer penalising those who reveal a desire to emigrate.

“However, the key concern is that the implementation date of March 23 is very early for education providers and their agents to have the requirements systems in place,” he said.

In this episode, the vice-chancellor of the UK University of East Anglia, David Maguire, joins UK director of Online Education Services, Andrea Burrows, to give an overview of the current university financial crisis in the UK. 

Universities in the United Kingdom are struggling to afford to enrol their own home students ever since tuition fees were frozen in 2017 at £9,250 a year despite a growing 18-year-old cohort, rising inflation and increasing teaching costs.

Professor Maguire has worked at at eight universities since starting his career, and been vice-chancellor at four since 2017, when tuition fees were frozen.

He suggests one reason a university might fail financially is when its student numbers are falling faster than its competitors, damaging its reputation.

To overcome this, universities need to find a point of differentiation to avoid relying on a perception of prestige. His own university lives by the motto 'do different'.

Professor David Maguire is the vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia in the UK. He has researched and worked in the fields of geographic information systems and higher education policy. The professor was vice-chancellor of the University of Greenwich from 2011 to 2019, interim vice-chancellor of the University of Dundee in 2020 and at the University of Sussex from 2021-2022.

Andrea Burrows is the UK managing director for Online Education Services (OES), an education body that partners with universities across Britain and Europe to create 'student-centric' online learning. She has a professional leadership background in marketing, advertising and digital transformation across higher education, finance and professional service sectors.

Commentary on the issue of international students has varied wildly, from sheer despair to quiet optimism.

Public institutions (with some exceptions) have fared badly, with slashes to staffing and budgets evident in the media on a daily basis.

Private institutions have had varied success. Indeed, some have remained remarkably buoyant, the result of a quick and effective use of online learning, accompanied by a more realistic and sustainable business model.

Bubble one: Closed international borders

The current pool of onshore international students (many not actually wanting to go home given the circumstances and the relatively good COVID situation in Australia) will inevitably dry up. In the short term, they will likely become a most highly sought-after group that will be enticed by a range of incentives such as discounts, scholarships and all kinds of promises.

The political and ethical pressures of bringing home Australian citizens as a priority has and will curb the enthusiasm for creating international student bubbles – certainly in the short term.

The geo-political environment will also place considerable pressure of potential international students coming to Australia. My own institution currently has a large contingent from India – this will not be replenished for some time given the pandemic situation on the sub-continent.

Meanwhile, our closed international borders send an explicit message – ‘do not apply’. For countries such as China, India, Nepal and to a lesser extent Malaysia and Indonesia, this will continue to have an impact on potential enrolments.

Anecdotally, Australia still has strong drawing power – and may eventually recover to a certain degree in terms of inbound international student traffic. Field (2020)^[1] suggests that given the ongoing health issues in the US and Europe, locations such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada may be ripe for a strong rebound and even possibly a significant backlog, once the situation changes.

Bubble two: Closed domestic borders

The key issue here is that given the severe restriction on Australian citizens moving across state and territory lines, the message also remains clear that both domestic and international students will find themselves restricted from transfer and/or travel in the short-term (2020–21) and possibly longer.

Even if international borders were somehow opened up quicker than expected, the notion of allowing international student access would have some solid opposition domestically. This is essentially a political ‘hot potato’.

The recent tale of New Zealand travellers coming to Sydney and then moving seamlessly to other states around Australia created a sense of outrage in many quarters. There is currently a sensitivity surrounding such matters.

This same – or perhaps heightened – sensitivity will exist for international students while domestic border closures and restrictions remain in place.

Toil and trouble: Is online a temporary safeguard or permanent saviour?

The prestigious universities in Australia have indicated that they are faring reasonably well, given the number of international students who have remained with them online.

The University of Sydney, for example, recently downsized its pending deficit forecast, based on the number of international students who have remained enrolled online. The impact of this, in the short term at least, will be a dependence on virtual teaching and learning.

A recent report from Deloitte (2020)^[2] indicated that 77 per cent of postgraduate students (using a representative sample) were satisfied with the online option they have been using during COVID-19, and anticipated that a blended approach to future study post COVID-19 was likely.

My own institution found even greater support for online learning becoming the dominant method of course delivery. A survey of postgraduate students in October 2020 found that an overwhelming 92 per cent preferred to stay online rather than participate in a staged ‘hybrid’ return to campus. The Australian Financial Review (2020)^[3] had similar findings.

Online and a future blended approach – certainly for postgraduate studies – thus appears highly likely. And this may not be a bad thing in reality. The shift, delivered in a relatively short period of time, has not been without a lot of toil and trouble. Yet it has seen the education sector as a whole walk back from the direst of predictions when the pandemic first took hold.

Emeritus Professor Greg Whateley is currently deputy vice chancellor at Group Colleges Australia.

For those who remember, campuses went into shutdown around March/April, and we are now into the half-year mark of remote learning. In July 2020, we learnt from the Department of Home Affairs that the number of student visa lodgements offshore are down by 33.3 per cent compared to the same time last year.

When students cannot come onshore, universities, especially those that rely heavily on this source of income, need to look elsewhere to fill the 'financial hole'. Already there is much anticipation for universities in Australia to expand their cross-border program where students remain in their home countries while doing an Australian qualification – what has been widely known as transnational education.

To assume that everything will be back to normal after the outbreak is over would be a dangerous position to take. With the increasing hostility reported by some western countries on international students of a particular nationality, it won't be surprising to foresee major transnational markets such as China reconsider who it wants to partner with when the current chaos from COVID-19 comes to an end.

COVID-19 has changed the dynamics of international markets in many ways. The recent data on incoming international students published in March 2020 by Department of Education Skills and Employment using the UNESCO Institute of Statistics have seen USA, Australia, Canada, China and UK as the top 5 countries in terms of numbers in 2017.

Interesting statistics if one considers that China has learned the mechanism to open up its education for international students after the Post-war era or that UK has slipped from its position as one of the top three. At the same time, we can see that other traditional markets such as Malaysia and Vietnam are starting to face a worsening economical downturn that could affect the conventional middle-income families – those who have been attracted to Australian transnational education.

While the outburst of COVID-19 has been unexpected, the reality now is to do damage control while seeking to protect the interests of those affected as well as universities (be it financially and in terms of academic exchange we enjoyed so far).

But universities should pause for a second and take some time out to re-examine their internationalisation strategy. Have we succeeded in our claims on using transnational education as a motor to improve the capacity building of host countries? Are our models on transnational education sustainable in the long run? Or more bluntly, is our internationalisation strategy lopsided with an emphasis on numbers, particularly at the undergraduate level and with a concentration in only a few selected markets?

The unsustainable fly-in-fly-out mode for delivery, the interesting political developments of the traditional hosting countries of TNE, and perceived tension between countries point to one fact – that current ways of Australian transnational education are probably not sustainable. However, to advocate a change, we need a paradigm shift in terms of how we value the relationships and the academic contribution to capacity building with host countries and the transnational models we adopt. But most importantly, this is the time to think carefully about the value of transnational education.

The last thing one would want to see is an erosion of quality. A possible trend when one considers the increasing acceptance of lower-level Year 11 of Victoria Curriculum Education (VCE) instead of Year 12 as entry requirements for university degrees. The widening of entry is feasible for onshore Australian students due to their familiarity with the higher education teaching pedagogies. Many Asian students, however, continue to struggle with western pedagogies and their English competency. Before COVID-19, many students from these countries were already struggling to cope with learning in English.

History tells us short-term, quick-fix solutions can only lead to long-term disasters. In our quest for survival in the transnational education market, any attempts to prioritise student numbers to fill financial gaps by unnecessarily relaxing entry requirements into degree courses, over academic quality, will be a foolish move.

Fion Lim works at Victoria University in the area of quality assurance of third-party arrangements.

Australia’s PISA scores have been declining ever since we first participated in the global sampling study in 2000 (in Reading since 2000, in Mathematics since 2003 and in Science since 2012). Conversely, whereas 10 per cent of Australian students achieved Level 5 in mathematics or higher, the percentage of students who achieved this level in our near neighbours include Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (China) (44 per cent), Singapore (37 per cent), Hong Kong (China) (29 per cent), Macao (China) (28 per cent), Chinese Taipei (23 per cent) and Korea (21 per cent). Despite these amazing scores from the countries in which we recruit international students, there is still a prevailing sense that somehow our international students put downward pressure on our academic quality.

How could these contradictory results or feelings be reconciled? Could it be that there is a simple solution? Could it be that we are taking in incredibly bright students from our Asian neighbours and then making them study in English?

It is a sad but true reality that the world’s brightest students are not primed for Australia. The marketing parlance of the student decision-making tree is useful if you think about the soil in which these decision-making trees are grown. Cultural priming starts at an early age when the former colonial glory of the UK and the former cultural significance of the great American dream loomed large on the TV sets and imported merchandise worn on the streets of developing countries.

Australia is almost always a second destination and we do not top the world rankings for prestigious research-based universities. Given the fact that there can only be 100 universities in the Top 100 universities, we all know that shunting every spare teaching dollar into research in order to move up theses rankings has been a Sisyphean task.

Sispyhus was given his boulder to lug uphill in Hades for all time because he had ticked off Zeus with his hubris too many times. Australian universities have voluntarily taken on this Sispyhean task because of a lack of hubris – we feel the cultural cringe that our research, our theorising, our discoveries, are not perhaps really as good as those of the UK and US. This is, quite simply, a sad hangover of our colonial past. Our second-preference status works in our favour when the dollar is low compared to Asian currencies and right at the moment, when a pandemic is not under control in our major competitor markets of the US and the UK. But it won’t last.

We have very low English language requirements for the courses for which there is international demand. We try to use global examples (McDonalds, for example, in a commerce tutorial), and if you’ve ever had to mark written work in business, humanities and the social sciences from students with an IELTS of 6.0, I don’t have to explain to you why we are not giving these students an excellent education.

Because of the accommodations we make to take in large numbers of students with low English levels, we don’t give a good student experience to our domestic students either. All we get out of this is money – we certainly don’t get quality, enhanced reputation or a system we can be proud of.

There is a way to have better students – students able to wow us with the critical thinking skills and disciplinary knowledge we are teaching them. It is a solution long overdue and of which TEQSA maintains an anachronistic stance, but if there was ever time for change, surely it is now.

As a young teaching assistant and sessional lecturer at McGill University in Montreal, I could teach in English or French, but not both and students could submit their work in either, but not both. We would hold additional ‘free’ tutorials for Francophone students who had trouble expressing themselves fluently and understanding the more complex ideas in English. But this bilingualism was about nationalism, not academic excellence and the time has come to move beyond indefensible notions of the English language as somehow intrinsic to being Australian or delivering a better education outcome.

There is absolutely no correlation between a student’s intelligence and readiness for university study, and their level of English. PISA results show us how gifted students are in neighbouring countries and yet we don’t deem them good enough to study with us because they can’t express themselves well in English. The result is that we miss out on the world’s largest potential student recruitment markets and instead take students who are trying to write in what may be their third, fourth or fifth language.

Why on earth do we continue to only teach in English? What argument could possibly be made to suggest that we cannot create equivalent learning outcomes in any language?

The world has moved on from the fractious days of English versus French nationalist tensions in Quebec and it is time Australia moved on as well. AI, translation and analytics make multilingual teaching eminently feasible. Even the United Nations has adopted real-time translation for its meetings.

Multilingual policies and practices occur in Europe in areas where there are significant students with different mother tongues because they are living in an officially bilingual country or because they come to study from nearby regions that speak other languages.

For example, at the University of Helsinki, instruction is in Swedish and Finnish and students have a right to service in English, Swedish and Finnish. The University of Lleida keeps alive the Catalan language by having instruction in Catalan, Spanish and English. The list is long but these world-ranked universities have very long established policies, procedures and best practice codes for learning, teaching and examining in multiple languages. The ability to continue Indigenous and migrant languages of Australia is another obvious important reason to teach in more languages than the language of British colonisation.

If Australian universities deem English to be a requirement for graduation, separate tests can be taken upon graduation but it is hard to see an objective argument that could be raised for such a requirement outside the politics of the culture wars and a particular view of Australian nationalism that has little relevance in the geopolitical situation of the contemporary nation.

We speak about international destinations being “scholarship destinations”. This means that only a small upper class can afford Australian international fees. If we taught in Bahasa, for example, and in Spanish, and in Arabic, Malay, and Hindi, we could teach in other countries, partially in other countries, online, and we could even have universities specialise in their languages of instruction. Imagine if Southern Cross University taught in English and Bahasa, Griffith University taught in English in Spanish, and Charles Sturt University taught in English and Hindi.

Teaching in multiple languages allows us to teach in other countries, to decrease recruitment costs, to diversify, to recruit the best students, to continue to go for growth but not at the expense of student experience. No amount of academic quality assurance mumbo jumbo can be evinced that careful design of equivalent learning outcomes cannot conquer. It’s a no-brainer and its time has come.

Monique Skidmore has been a deputy vice-chancellor international at several Australian universities.

1. We only recruit significant student numbers from a few Asian destinations.
2. We do not generally get the best and brightest students in the world.
3. We routinely do not give the students who do come here an excellent education in their chosen discipline because of language barriers.

There are many ways we can change the way we recruit for excellence in student ability. Here I explain why diversity in international education has not happened much to date and how recruitment practices can change to recruit from many more markets.

The cost of recruitment

If you ran a private company, a core aspect of your business would be to know the cost of sales. It is possible to work out the cost of recruitment per student for each international market, it’s just generally not done. The trick is in knowing all the parts of tertiary institutions that touch each project and this grows with the size and geographical sites of an institution.

For example, a vice-chancellor may ‘pop in’ to University A when on an overseas trip (remember when we did that kind of thing). A week later a staff member ‘pops over to China’ for a six-week teaching block at University A (and does no research during this time). Casual staff backfill their teaching. Then university recruitment agents visit University A with their local agents in tow. All these obvious and not-so-obvious costs begin to mount up and need to be wrangled into a project management framework that can calculate a real ROI on international activities for all staff.

Visiting agents, converting data from agent portals (like IDP’s OSCAR) into student management systems, spending thousands of dollars to take part in third-party arranged 'Exhibitions' (that we often pay agents on our part to attend as well as flying in university staff) – these costs for universities or TAFEs constitute the traditional model of agent recruitment overlaid with the often hidden 'engagement' cost. Together they give us the real cost per student recruitment per market.

A true analysis would match these costs with a conversion and retention cost. Again, it is easy to work out the improved revenue for each percentage point increase in conversion of offers, but it is not quite as easy to calculate the costs of the insalubrious activities to our international reputation among prospective students that have come along with our well-developed agent recruitment practices that I described in an earlier article in Campus Review.

In this article I also explained how this traditional model in established markets can largely be done away with or at least enormously streamlined through the use of commercially available technologies.

The problem with not diversifying

I’ve written in Campus Review recently about the problems with continuing a 20^th century agent-based recruiting system in established markets in an era of data and analytics. The most obvious demonstration of the geopolitical risks that can’t be managed with this strategy has been the recent threats by China to turn off the tap of Chinese students. There doesn’t need to be a diplomatic war of words about this. China can simply stop recognising Australian qualifications in China.

A few years ago the Chinese Ministry of Education stopped recognising Australian qualifications taught jointly in China where it deemed the ranking of the Australian university or its Chinese university partner to be lower than desirable. We don’t know where this is going to land for Australia but it may not be good.

Unknown and uncontrollable events (like pandemics) and foreign policy changes aside, the quality of an education we give is simply not good enough when we have over 90 per cent of students from one country in a subject. And we can pretend that an IELTS score of 6.0 is perfectly good enough, but whilst we continue to teach in English, we will not have students comprehensively understanding what is being taught and being able to express their thoughts. Anyone who has ever marked an essay by a commerce student with IELTS of 5.5 or 6.0 in writing will know exactly what I mean.

Diversification into new markets

So, how do we dramatically increase the funnel so that we can recruit a truly diverse population of international students? We do know that the non-engagement-related costs of recruitment rises dramatically when you move out of six major markets. It is, as you would have guessed, lowest in China.

We know where the markets for international students are – they are in the MINT countries – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. These countries have rising GDP, rising bilateral trade with Australia, the largest global proportions of 18-24 year-olds, and education systems that are of a high enough quality to produce students with the potential to meet Australian entry requirements. But there are many other countries not too far behind that are excellent targets.

To further narrow then to Nigeria – the world’s largest youth population and an excellent target for Australia, being also in the Southern hemisphere and Perth being one of the largest international student hubs reasonably close by. Nigeria, as a former British colony, has a recruitment pattern that has been forged by the British Council. This is true in other African countries that are former British colonies, such as Kenya (another terrific target). There are established flows of students between the UK and Nigerian schools and universities. Australia has been the international star of recruitment using the traditional methods of agents, exhibitions and partnering with universities. These methods are required to seed influence and disrupt existing student flows to other receiving countries.

The risks are higher – agents carry significantly higher risks and I have had an agent abscond with all of that semester’s student deposits so he could pay for his father’s knee operation. He wrote a lovely letter apologising to the students – but still, it’s a risk. Similarly, the cost of visiting Nigeria safely is much higher. A better solution is in-country staff who monitor agents and represent universities.

I cannot see a much cheaper way of diversification until these markets have become part of a university’s 'regular' list of high-performing course countries. But it means that recruitment costs have to come down in other areas of the business. All this ecologically unsustainable flying around and staying in 5-star hotels with limos to and from airport lounges in order to recruit students from our large source countries – it’s simply unnecessary given the technology available to recruit students more directly. And at a time when an Arts student might be facing a 113 per cent increase in student fees – how can we possibly justify this pre-pandemic form of recruitment?

As Australian universities begin flying in small numbers of international students, technology must be used to do away with the old factory-style recruitment processes and instead, strategy, data analysis, and careful market seeding for disruption needs to occur if Australian universities are to be free of the risks of over-reliance on a small number of countries.

Monique Skidmore has been a deputy vice-chancellor international at several Australian universities.

During COVID-19 and in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak, major destination countries explored different ways to secure international student recovery. Flexibility and incentives around post-study work and migration tend to offer a quicker route to attract international students and thus international education recovery.

Australia’s third largest export sector, worth over AUD $40 billion dollars and supporting nearly 250,000 full-time jobs, has been direly affected by international travel bans in place since March 2020. This saw a 16 per cent decrease in international student arrivals in the year to March 2020 and an estimated 20 per cent decline in international enrolments this year as well as next. As it stands, universities expect to lose between $3.1-$4.8 billion this year alone with forecasts of this rising to $16 billion by 2023.   

The current predicament facing many international students in Australia and in other leading study destinations such as the US, UK and Canada is how measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 in the form of border restrictions and transition to online learning will impact on the quality of their education, their overall experiences and the timely completion of their courses. For many, these impacts are closely tied to whether they would qualify for post-study work visas that allow them to live and work in their host countries after they graduate.

The convergence of post-study work visa programmes in many study destinations is the latest iteration of the link between education and migration. The tacit link between education and migration nexus is one which governments are reluctant to acknowledge. Yet, it is very clear that pathways to post-study opportunities to live and work in host countries are key drivers in attracting international students. Our survey with over 1,150 international graduates found that 76 per cent of international students indicated that post-study work visa was an important factor in their decision to study in Australia.  

Post-study work visa is now the default model adopted by major destination countries around the world to attract international students. But the current situation where international graduates are stranded and forced to transition to online learning jeopardises their eligibility for these visas which typically require them to spend the entirety of their studies onshore.

In March, Canada rolled out measures permitting international students who spend part of their studies online either onshore or offshore to still count that time towards their eligibility for post-study visas, provided that those offshore do complete at least 50 percent of their courses onshore.

More recent developments to support international students also include a priority visa processing and a two-stage approval process, both designed to secure international students and lock in their commencement with online learning. The UK similarly announced that on the proviso international students arrived in the UK by April 2021, they would maintain their eligibility for the post-study work visa (Graduate Immigration Route) even if they commenced the 20/21 study year online.

Being agile in this space is critical in attracting international students especially on the back of the US’s shock decision (which it quickly rescinded) to send home international students whose educational institutions had transitioned to online study foregrounded by the increasing number of COVID-19 infections in the United States.

It is critical for Australia to move quickly and to make adjustments permitting online study and/or offshore time due to COVID-19 to be counted towards post-study work visas and this week’s announcement simply places Australia in line with Canada and the UK, three months after the former started making strong moves to position themselves as preferred study destinations. In the immediate term, this is both fair and strategic for Australia and its international students as it ensures both ethical commitment and good economic strategy in a competitive market intensified by COVID-19.

Flexibility and support around post-study work visas might be an effective response and a quick route to create destination attraction and secure international student recovery. However, to reach more sustainable enrolment goals and ensure ethical commitment to the international cohort to delivering on promise, the move needs to be accompanied with coordinated policies to enhance employment and welfare for international students.

The UK for example announced a lower salary threshold as per their profession when international students transition from post-study to skilled worker visa, a move seen to potentially address one of the impediments in securing employment.

Australia’s current post-study work visa scheme – while among the most generous around the world – is not without shortcomings. Our study found that international student graduates were perceived as a ‘complicated’ labour source by some employers who had misconceptions of complex paperwork involved or that they had to act as sponsors.

Assuring access to post-study work visa in the current climate only brings Australia on par with Canada and the UK, which only partly addresses the challenges facing the international education sector. As it stands, Australia needs to harness the flexibility and some of the innovation demonstrated by its competitors and consider that for longer term and more sustainable change.

It is crucial to also work towards ensuring better employment outcomes for temporary graduate visa holders. Recommendations from our study were to raise local businesses’ awareness of the temporary graduate visa, its purpose and scope to decrease stereotyping and give international graduates more of a chance to gain skills in their field.

Another recommendation is to include an option to extend or renew the 485 visa for an additional one or two years for those who have been employed full or part-time in their field of study, or those who have started their own business in or outside their field of study with a certain level of income.

It is likely that unless both post-study work visa arrangements and employment outcomes for international students post-graduation are improved, the current issues facing international graduates could impede Australia’s competitiveness globally in the face of evolving international student expectations and converging policies relating post-study work rights in competing study destinations.

What COVID does offer is an opportunity to do things better and that is what Canada and the UK seem to be doing with policies seeking to address some of the impediments faced by international student migrants or temporary migrants. Among critical support mechanisms for international students during and in the aftermath of COVID-19, swift, well-coordinated and clearly-communicated policies across post-study work visas and employability that ensure flexibility and fairness and, at the same time, enhance employment outcomes are crucial to creating more sustainable and long lasting destination attractions.

George Tan is a Research Fellow in the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University.

Ly Tran is a Professor in the School of Education at Deakin University and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow.

The program alleged that some Australian universities have become far too reliant on foreign fee-paying students to boost revenue, and have subsequently jeopardised the integrity and standing of Australia’s university sector, the country’s third-biggest export market.

Another concern raised was that some universities have been waiving courses’ English language requirements, established to ensure international students are set up for success both academically and socially.

The academics interviewed for the program contended that waiving requirements had not only led to a spike in academic misconduct but increased mental health problems associated with academic failure and social and cultural isolation for students.

Other interviewees were concerned that many international students were not interacting with “local” Australians or enjoying the lush and spacious campus grounds sold to them in glossy brochures. Instead they were placed in university campuses in major cities, at times unaware that the administrative centre for the university was in another state.

Cash Cows also suggested that waiving of language requirements had a deleterious effect on domestic students. The program interviewed a former Master of IT student at Murdoch University in Perth, Daniel Manganaro. He said he dropped out of a subject because the tutorial group he was in did not use English.

One of the universities mentioned in the program was The University of Tasmania. The University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Rufus Black, has committed to an “external review to test concerns about international admissions”.

“We want to be a university that is focused on high-quality education for qualified international students,” Professor Black said.

“We also have made it very clear within our new institutional strategy that we are taking a right-sized approach and that the march for constant growth is not part of our future.

“I am concerned, having seen the claims from Four Corners, that the changes we have been introducing to align to those two things have not had enough impact soon enough…

“Today I am constituting a senior group – led by our provost, the chief operating officer and the executive director quality and standards – to oversee admissions until our external review is complete and its recommendations are introduced.”

Professor Black also said the university would no longer be accepting Medium of Instruction (MOI) letters for international student admissions, documents that state that a student has received most of their learning instruction in a specific language, such as English. These letters can be used in lieu of completing English language testing.

University, student and professional associations have hit back at the program’s claims, with the International Education Association of Australia (IEAA) labelling it as biased and ignorant of the benefit international students bring to Australia

“Each time the Four Corners producers focus on Australia’s international education sector they seem intent on finding as many negative angles as possible. Any media outlet can string together a group of disaffected academics, students and even education agents," said the CEO of the IEAA, Phil Honeywood.

"The fact that the program’s producers and reporters continually choose to ignore the incredibly positive outcomes that Australia is achieving with our 450,000 overseas students is cause for real concern.”

The CEO of English Australia, Brett Blacker, also criticised the program’s unbalanced view.

“The English language academic entry requirements were the focus of a particular attack from Four Corners on this occasion. However, no mention was made that only 18 months ago Australia significantly toughened up its English language entry standards. This included direct entry pathway agreements which are now subject to stricter controls by the national regulator. These regulations are now regarded as some of the most stringent in the world.”

Chair of Universities Australia, Professor Margaret Garner, told Four Corners that Australian universities are a success story and data backs this up.

“There is overall evidence that, in fact, the system holds up. It has good entry standards, it has good standards in terms of what it takes to successfully complete a degree,” Professor Gardner said.

“And there is evidence that we are admitting students who are able to succeed at about the rate that is really right for having a high-quality education system in Australia.”

Mr Honeywood and Mr Blacker also attacked the program’s producers for editing out much of Professor Gardner’s interview.

“With this latest program, the Chair of Universities Australia, Prof. Margaret Gardner, willingly provided an extensive interview which the producers chose to make significant and detrimental cuts to in the editing room,” they said in a joint statement.

Released yesterday, ShanghaiRanking Consultancy's 2017 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) gave the University of Melbourne top Australian honours. It ranked 39th, one place better than last year.

Rounding out the Australian leaders were the University of Queensland (55th), Monash University (78th), the University of Sydney (83rd), the University of Western Australia (91st) and the Australian National University (97th).

The University of Adelaide and University of New South Wales placed between 100 and 150.

But our institutions still lag behind their counterparts in the US and UK. For the 15th consecutive year, Harvard ranked first. Stanford continued its second place reign, while the University of Cambridge pipped MIT and Berkeley for third place.

Since 2003, the ARWU has presented its top 500 universities, based on surveys of over 1200 institutions. This year, it also published the rankings of those in the 500–800 range. Its methodology is as below:

Education minister Simon Birmingham congratulated the Australian university industry for its overall performance, though he included a political touch in his otherwise laudatory statement.

"To maintain our competitiveness, we need to keep building partnerships with business and industry, bolstering and diversifying our research capacity, to keep focused on student outcomes and to make our universities more accessible and sustainable," he wrote.

"That’s what the Turnbull government’s higher education reforms are about."

The complete rankings can be viewed here.

In their global education study, they surmised that: "This presumably reflects the proactivity of the higher education sector – it is the sector’s activities that have shaped the evolution of many national policies."

Australia scored extremely highly on almost all measures. It came first in openness, degree quality and transnational engagement. Where it fell notably short was in sustainable development policies; placing 30th out of 38 countries.  The criteria in this last category "relate to outbound scholarships and foreign language provision in the country. The countries with minimal efforts in this space are Australia, Russia and the UK," the Council said.

Perhaps Australia needn't immediately worry. International student figures provided by the ABS this month show that in the last financial year, revenue from international students grew by 18.5 per cent. This is due to a proliferation of student numbers, which swelled 14 per cent in that period. According to TEQSA, Australia is the third most popular destination for international students.

Still, if Australia wants to maintain its preeminent position, it should strive for podium positions across all benchmarks.