Demand from Chinese students declines Down Under

Chinese demand for Australian higher education has dropped, in a reflection of changing enrolment patterns around the globe.

Chinese citizens were granted 25 per cent fewer visas for higher education study in the second half of 2025 compared with the equivalent period of 2024, according to the latest available statistics from Australia’s Department of Home Affairs. Chinese applications for higher education visas fell by 26 per cent.

Demand for degree-level education from Australia’s dominant student source market is at its lowest level since the coronavirus pandemic and lower than in pre-Covid years, the figures suggest.

Similar trends are playing out in other major educational destinations. Chinese student numbers in UK higher education fell by 4 per cent last financial year, reaching their lowest level since 2019-20, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency – although recent figures from British admissions service Ucas show universities have experienced a recent surge in Chinese applications.

Nous Group principal Matt Durnin said Chinese enrolments across Australia, Canada, the UK and US had declined by 13 per cent over the four years since their 2019-20 peak, with applications falling further in 2025. Durnin said declining household income and youth demographics in China had contributed to the trend, but the single biggest driver had been the “tremendous improvement” in the perceived quality of local universities.

While anglophone nations have rolled out policies to deter foreign students, China watchers say recent trends have as much to do with domestic factors – particularly China’s flagging economy and growing scepticism about the value of foreign degrees – as the actions of foreign governments.

Taizhou-based marketing analyst Jannifer Yu said “disappointment” was an overriding element of the “sceptical and sometimes openly dismissive” Chinese social media chatter about Australian universities.

Yu’s sentiment analysis of discussion threads on the Chinese social media platform Zhihu revealed a growing sense that Australian degrees lacked “credibility in the eyes of Chinese employers”, and that students’ experiences – both during and after their studies Down Under – were not meeting expectations.

Writing in the public policy website Pearls and Irritations, Yu said Antipodean universities’ “over-generalised marketing” was letting them down. “When Australia is promoted as equally suitable for academic high-flyers, migration-focused students and those seeking rapid career advancement in China, disappointment becomes almost inevitable.”

People’s Daily Online reported that Australian universities’ longstanding appeal in China had rested on rankings success, a “mild climate” and a “follow-the-crowd” mentality. But choice of destination was becoming “markedly more rational” as students assessed the value of Australian degrees against soaring tuition costs, living expenses and visa fees. “Cost has become the most critical variable,” the news site editorialised.

Analysts say China is “no longer the easy gold mine” as economic pressures – reflected in soaring youth unemployment, declining income growth and widescale bankruptcies – force families to become more cost-conscious.

Internationally mobile students are seeking opportunities closer to home, in destinations like Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, while authorities are encouraging joint ventures with foreign universities on home soil.

Demographic decline could also erode enrolments abroad, although analysts do not expect school-leaver numbers to begin falling until the 2030s.

Some Australian universities escalated their Chinese recruitment in 2024, possibly deciding to cash in on a lucrative market while they still could. But China specialist Angela Lehmann, head of global engagement at Universities Australia (UA), said the Chinese-Australian educational relationship was now “moving past its frantic early growth” into a period of “hardwood” maturity.

Lehmann said the new relationship had been exemplified by UA’s recent delegation to China, when Australian vice-chancellors hobnobbed with industry leaders about mutual research priorities instead of touting for student enrolments. “The relationship is…less about rapid expansion and more about the structural integrity of shared research and evidence,” she writes in The Koala News.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com