Visa squeeze ‘undermining offshore push’, says former minister

Both sides of Australian politics have undermined the opportunity to build a major offshore education industry serving some of the country’s closest neighbours, according to former vocational education minister and Liberal Party heavyweight Andrew Robb.

Robb told a Sydney forum that the tightening of visa policy from 2023, fuelled by concerns about housing availability, had torpedoed a promising transnational education venture he had helped launch.

The New Edge Education Group, which Robb serves as “ambassador”, had teamed up with a Vietnamese college to deliver Australian curricula in construction and several other vocational disciplines. Some 4,000 Vietnamese students had enrolled, and similar programmes had been launched in India and Indonesia.

While the venture covered its costs on the fees paid by locals, its financial viability depended on commissions earned by bringing some of the top-performing students to Australia as sponsored skilled migrants. The scheme was designed to address both South-east Asia’s need for skills training and Australia’s need for skilled workers, Robb told the Australia China Business Council’s international education forum on 9 June.

Of some 300 students who wanted to come to Australia, just one was denied a visa. But when the exercise was repeated, just 2 per cent received visas. The treatment of highly skilled Australian-trained workers had changed “overnight”, Robb said. “The whole programme fell on its head, and 4,000 students got cut off.”

In 2012, when he was shadow finance minister, Robb predicted that Australia could be educating 10 million foreigners within a decade – through offshore education, onshore education and a combination of both – with the right policy settings. That perception was reinforced when he served as trade minister between 2013 and 2016, and was repeatedly lobbied by his South-east Asian counterparts to provide more skills training in their countries.

“There’s enormous opportunity to take our curricula into the region,” Robb told the forum. But the opportunity had been undermined by the “critical” policies of the major political parties. “Both sides have been at this.”

The assistant minister for foreign affairs and trade, Matt Thistlethwaite, said the vocational education and training systems of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines were modelled on Australian arrangements. He said his government was trying to encourage Australian institutions to deliver their curriculum across South-east Asia.

Thistlethwaite told the forum that the May federal budget had set aside money to “deepen” vocational education engagement with the region.

But Adam Kilburn, CEO of the National English Language Teaching Accreditation Scheme (Neas), said the government’s supportive rhetoric “skated over the reality that we are in fact losing a very important piece of the international student journey”.

“Providers are being forced out of the industry because of government policy,” he told the forum. He said Neas, a quality assurance agency, had lost about 40 per cent of its membership over the past few years. Some colleges were surviving by “hibernating” their English language programmes. Others were “shifting to areas that don’t involve student visas” which were “near impossible to get”, and offering “study tours” of up to six weeks – which students could undertake on regular visitor’s visas.

All this is undermining the “beginning of the pipeline” of international tertiary study, Kilburn said. “English language provides the opportunity…to adjust to life in Australia [and] gain connections with community. Students [are] not going to succeed if they’re not nurtured at that point in which they learn the cultural facets of the place they’re coming to study.”

Data specialist Keri Ramirez said that before the coronavirus pandemic, 45 per cent of international higher education students had first undertaken other studies in Australia, notably in English language. By 2024-25, that proportion had halved.

Consequently, more students – particularly from China – were now rejecting offers of places at Australian universities, Ramirez told the forum. “Before, students…were [already] here in Australia. They were already engaged, and they were going to continue their studies. Now we’re subject to a more vulnerable market.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com