E&OE
Sarah Dingle:
Catriona Jackson is chief executive and a board director of Universities Australia, the peak body representing Australia’s university sector and she joins me now. Catriona Jackson, welcome. What’s your first reaction to this new look 10-year migration strategy?
Catriona Jackson:
I think what you heard from the Minister right there, Sarah, was a very strong endorsement of the contribution – both economic and social – that international students have made in this country. I think this strategy, a big piece of reform and a big decade-long reform project, is really moving in the right direction. We asked for some simplification of the system. We asked for some of the barnacles to be shaved off that have just built up over time that make it harder for students to see a clear path. I think the emphasis from the Minister on getting rid of this sort of cavalcade of temporary, another temporary, another temporary visa is exactly the right approach. The sorts of students we want to come here and a few more to stay – students who’ll be here as permanent citizens making a really comprehensive contribution.
Sarah Dingle:
I want to ask you about this so-called student hopping that these changes aim to prevent. What is student hopping?
Catriona Jackson:
You come to Australia, you make an application to study architecture at the University of Melbourne, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to do something like floristry at the something something college of floristry, which is a very short course that will lead to a job very quickly. What we need to do is make sure we’re protecting the integrity of the system, making sure that students are genuinely coming here as students to study, not as a proxy for getting a job. There are some changes in there and we haven’t seen all the detail yet – this is a big strategy – but we think it’s entirely appropriate that if you are from one of those fantastic 144 countries that come to Australia to study here, you make an absolutely genuine statement about why you want to come and you stick with it.
Sarah Dingle:
Let’s talk about the minimum English language requirements for international students, which will be lifted under this strategy. To what standard will they be lifted and is that a fair requirement?
Catriona Jackson:
We had comprehensive discussions around this through the consultations. The lifting of those standards is important. It won’t make an enormous difference to universities because Australian universities have higher than the minimum standards already. Students who are studying at university don’t need to fear this. There’s some more conversation about how we deal with students who come here to do preparation courses before they enter university. But again, we’ve had good conversations with the Minister and with departmental officials around how we might deal with that. It’s really important that students when they come here can speak well and really get on with their studies in the fullest way and that they can speak well when they finish their degrees as well. The upping of standards is something that we support, but it won’t make an enormous amount of difference to most university students because as I said, the standards imposed by Australian universities are higher than the minimum anyway.
Sarah Dingle:
So, the federal government wants this strategy to curb arrivals, roughly halve them from last year to about 250,000. You say this won’t affect universities, so what decline, if at all, do you expect to see in international student numbers at universities as a result?
Catriona Jackson:
I’m not saying that these changes won’t affect universities at all and I’m not saying we aren’t having a really serious look at all 99 pages of the strategy. But we also know through what we’ve heard from Claire O’Neil and what we’ve heard from fellow ministers is that the government genuinely values the international student business that we’ve built up over 50, 60 years in Australia. If there were to be reductions, there should be reductions in the sorts of students who are not coming for genuine reasons. If you have a student who is coming from Bangladesh or a student who is coming from Bangalore or a student who’s coming from Bhutan who wants to study engineering and then at the end of their degree wants to seriously consider being an engineer in Australia, we absolutely welcome that student. Some of these changes will make it a bit easier for them to stay on and apply that trade, use those skills that they’ve gotten at an Australian university and become an engineer or a doctor or an IT specialist in this country. That’s a good thing. But it’s quite clear, I mean the Minister has made it really clear she wants to get the numbers down. Where she wants to get the numbers down is what’s important – in the unskilled areas, in the people who are coming here not genuinely to study but just for a job, and possibly in some of those unskilled areas where we might or might not need them and where we might simply need to up our efforts in educating both our domestic population in unskilled and unskilled areas at the same time. It has to be both things at the same time.
Sarah Dingle:
You don’t have an estimate yet on how much you expect the numbers of international students at universities to dip as a result of this strategy?
Catriona Jackson:
I would be surprised if international student numbers at universities – that means the genuine ones who are coming here, they’ve said they want to study architecture and that’s what they’re doing – I would be surprised if those numbers dipped enormously. The Minister’s acknowledged that we’ve got a bit of an increase at the moment because we’ve got a backlog. Everything stopped during COVID-19 – some people studied online but some didn’t and some are now catching up. We’ve got a bit of an increase just because kids who didn’t do their second year or their third year or their fourth year and stalled it for a while are catching up. I think things will level out over the next couple of years. That doesn’t mean that students who are not university students, they might be vocational students or people who are coming here who aren’t really coming to study. They’re coming to get a job in a month or two months after they’ve come here saying they want to study. Those numbers will go down and that’s the aim of the package.
Sarah Dingle:
Catriona Jackson, thank you for your time.
Catriona Jackson:
Pleasure, Sarah.
ENDS
