‘Damage already done’ as Australian dependants ban nears

Australia’s ban on visas for students’ dependants is likely to further curtail international education flows, but much of the damage has already been done by soaring visa rejections.

The curtailing of “secondary” visas – those granted to students’ family members – is expected to be the most significant of the education-related policy changes announced last week by immigration minister Tony Burke. But enrolments from the countries most likely to be affected have already been decimated by visa refusals.

Nepal and Bangladesh have attracted some of the highest shares of secondary student visas this decade, sending roughly one family member for every three students, on average. But in recent months, more than four in five student visa applications from the two countries have been rejected.

Monash University policy expert Andrew Norton said the ban on dependants could further reduce demand from the subcontinent by scuppering a key financing method. Students’ family members in Australia declared earnings of A$1.3 billion (£690 million) in 2022-23 alone, Norton observed. “Adult secondary student visa holders are likely to be an important aspect of the economics of coming to Australia for some students,” he blogged.

The country most affected – by a considerable margin – is likely to be Bhutan. The Himalayan kingdom claims easily the highest proportion of secondary student visas, with accompanying family members generally outnumbering students.

Bhutanese students often come to Australia as married couples, sometimes with children, and take turns to study while their partners work to pay the bills.

Plummeting demand from Bhutan would have a significant impact on enrolments in Western Australia. The kingdom of just 800,000 people is the state’s top source country for new students and second top source of continuing students.

However, reduced student flows could prove a blessing for the Bhutanese government, which fears that Australian educators are depriving it of too many citizens during some of their most productive years. About 15,500 Bhutanese students were in Australia in July, with 12,200 of their countryfolk on temporary graduate visas and 4,800 on bridging visas.

Consultant Claire Field said the ban on dependants could encourage educational recruiters to focus more on South-east Asia, which is exempt from the new rule, and on single students. However, demand from the significant source market with the lowest share of accompanying family members – China – is already in decline.

Course-hopping rule changes announced by Burke, meaning that subsequent student visas will only be available to people pursuing higher-level qualifications, could play to universities’ advantage while slashing international enrolments at vocational colleges.

The minister said he wanted to stamp out a “classic” form of “visa hopping”, where graduates enrolled in cheap courses with lax attendance requirements so that they could “get out there and work. This is being used effectively to drive a migration outcome, not an educational outcome,” Burke told the National Press Club.

Such instances are not rare, according to the Grattan Institute thinktank, which found that almost two-thirds of foreign taught master’s graduates who pursued further study in Australia did so by enrolling in vocational colleges.

Students will still be allowed to change courses midstream for “legitimate” reasons, Burke said, but they will have to obtain fresh visas. Currently, new visas are required if students transfer to lower-level courses, but the rule is seldom enforced.

Other changes could reduce the stock of overseas visitors available to pursue education. Many working holiday visas will now be rationed through ballots, while a “no further stay provision” will apply to visitor visas.

Visa refusals are likely to overshadow all these changes. With international student recruitment mostly completed for the year, foreign admissions at all but five public universities remain at least 20 per cent below the federal government’s quotas.

Burke said refusal rates were rising because checks had raised doubts over would-be students’ capacity to cover their costs. For some applicants, “the only way they were going to be able to afford the course was if they…spent 10 years working in Australia”, he said.

Shadow education minister Julian Leeser said visas were being denied to students in identical circumstances to others who had proved successful. Leeser told a Universities Australia webinar that the government had treated some institutions in a “manifestly unfair” way by approving visas for less than half of the students permitted under the quotas.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com