E&OE 

JOURNALIST: Well, what was your experience of university? In my day, we all sat in big lecture theaters, hung out in the refectory and met other students from all over Queensland. Some even came from interstate. Well, in the years since international students have been a feature of the system, their full fees helping to fund research, providing a big export income for Australia and enriching our higher education institutions. Now, the federal government’s announced that it’s going to cap the number of foreign students who can study in Australia. Here’s the Federal Education Minister Jason Claire earlier today. 

JASON CLARE: Today, I can announce that subject to the bill passing, the overall number of international students starting a course next year will be set at 270,000. This includes higher education courses and vocational education and training courses. And what this means is next year there’ll be about the same number of international students starting a course here as there were before the pandemic. There’ll be more in our universities and there’ll be fewer in our private vocational providers. 

JOURNALIST: That’s the Federal Education Minister. Margaret Sheil is with me. She’s the Vice-Chancellor of QUT. Margaret, 400,000 international students I read began studying in Australia, I think, this year or last year. This feels like a big cut. 

MARGARET SHEIL: It is in one sense because it’s coming on the back of what was a cut by restricting the number of visas. So yes, compared to this time last year, for some of us the number will be the same or a bit less or a bit more. But that also is on top of the other measures such as the Immigration Minister preferencing different kinds of students coming in. 

JOURNALIST: Okay, so you are saying that for some time now they’ve been using lots of different mechanisms, lots of different levers to ratchet down student numbers. 

MARGARET SHEIL: That’s right. Starting at the start of this year with the visa changes and I acknowledge that having a number gives us more certainty, so that’s a good thing. But for people who had other plans or plans to grow, it’s potentially a limiting factor. And also, already the work that’s happened or the impact of the visa changes has had an impact on our markets overseas and created uncertainty in that market. And we know that international students don’t choose a country, they choose a university and a course, and if they don’t get into that course, they’ll go to some other country potentially. 

JOURNALIST: Okay. So, the Minister says that all he’s doing is bringing it back to pre-pandemic levels, so that suggests, well, there’s no real change. You’re just doing next year what you did last year. How much of a change is this for someone in a job like yours, a vice-chancellor trying to make the money work? You’re running a big export industry as well as a big education institute. How much of an announcement is this? 

MARGARET SHEIL: Well, because the pandemic had such a devastating effect on so many of us in terms of our capacity to deliver to the students and the changes that were made by the Coalition when they introduced the new funding package for domestic students, it’s much harder now to do what we did before the pandemic. The Job-ready Graduates Package we’ve talked about that had the impost on the students, that raised the cost of arts degrees, that’s also reduced the amount of dollars per student we have to educate domestic students. So, QUT has a big domestic cohort, and now it’s much harder for us to deliver a good service to that cohort than it was in 2019. So, we’ve got that problem. We’ve had a couple of years of deficits and many of our universities had, and we thought we could ride out that with our plans for growing. So, our QUT strategy had us going from a pretty low base of 18 per cent to 25 per cent foreign students. We won’t be able to do that now. And so that means that any of the plans that we had to do a whole range of things for all our students and to invest in research we won’t be able to do. And we will have to start making really hard decisions about what we offer as a consequence of this.  

JOURNALIST: Okay. So, you’re saying when the Minister says let’s just go back to 2023, that’s almost like going back to the bad old days, the tough days, the post COVID days when you were struggling? 

MARGARET SHEIL: Yeah, and some universities grew very quickly after the borders opened and others didn’t. So, we saw two things happen. There was a concentration in the higher ranked universities because of policy changes in China. And so, there was a big shift in the demographics of international students in that period in universities as well as what’s happened in other sectors. And so, the group in QUT is a very high domestic load and less in international and didn’t benefit from the very high international ranking, it’s going to have a differential impact on us.  

JOURNALIST: When you see Sydney University, Melbourne University, and they’re up around 50 per cent of foreign students in their undergraduate courses, have we got out of balance somewhat?  

MARGARET SHEIL: Well, I can’t speak for them, but I can say that QUT has always tried to keep that balance. And it’s one of the reasons we didn’t have a high number of international students historically, because we have had this at each stage as we’ve grown our domestic numbers and international, we’ve tried to do that in balance. It’s sometimes hard. I mean, when I was at Melbourne, the demand for the University of Melbourne because of its position in the world is so great. It’s very hard to stop that.  

JOURNALIST: To stop it or you’re just basically saying it’s hard to resist the money. 

MARGARET SHEIL: No, it’s really hard to stop because you’re trying to, the demand is so high, so we would, when I was previously Provost at the University of Melbourne, every time we raise the entry standards, we got more demand. So, then you have a pathway and a pipeline, so, it’s not just that you can turn that off as easily as some people think when you have that strong demand. And also, there’s a huge gap in what we are getting for research and an unfunded element of our research.  

JOURNALIST: So, the international Student fees fund the research in universities?  

MARGARET SHEIL: Yes. And so, the bigger you are and the more research you have, the more of that gap. So, for us, it’s around $35 million. For Melbourne, it’s around $300 million. So, the research that you see coming out of the Doherty Institute during the pandemic, that’s been supported by the international students at the University of Melbourne, the research that we do is supported by international students. And so, it’s not a simple case of you can stop one thing and start doing another. It’s a very complex sector. The way to address it in part is to address the research underfunding, and that would have to be done over time, but it’s a big gap. And the second is to revisit the Job-ready Graduates Package and get a more sensible and coherent domestic funding package. And then international students could be, we can continue to have them as part of our experience, but in proportion to those other two activities.  

JOURNALIST: I’m speaking with Margaret Shield. The Vice-Chancellor of QUT says she’s got 18 per cent foreign students in undergraduate…  

MARGARET SHEIL: …undergraduate and postgrad. And our big demand is in engineering, which is also a huge demand for skills in this country, so that’s where we’re going to see, we’ve been putting our investment in to grow, and that’ll be curtailed by these caps. 

JOURNALIST: Okay. So, 18 per cent foreign students, she was hoping to move that university to 25 per cent. But as we say, southern sandstone universities are really overly dependent, arguably on international students to do their research and so forth. Nearly 50 per cent of undergrads are foreign students. Why are we doing this? And are we at risk of having a big impact economically in this country? It is a big export industry.  

MARGARET SHEIL: Well, it is a pretty blunt instrument on a big export industry. And I completely understand the pressures on housing, but again, that’s differentiated across the country. We don’t see quite the same pressures here in Brisbane. There’s certainly no link to international students as there might be in other places. And I think there is an argument that the size of Australian universities, the public doesn’t understand it, and some don’t have as good an experience as they’ve had previously. But I think there was a way to do this in a measured way that could have kept it in balance. The other thing about that, as we saw in the pandemic, a lot of other industries are impacted by the loss of international students. Those that rely on them for labour, the hospitality industry and also there’s a very vibrant private provider of housing for international students. That sector is also going to be dramatically 

JOURNALIST: And just finally, we’re nearly out of time. We have to talk about secondary education next. Is there a possibility that there’s international students out there who’ve got offers from Australian universities and places of higher learning? So, they’ve got their piece of paper saying, yes, you’ve got a place and they’re not going to be able to come here and study. 

MARGARET SHEIL: Well, that’s happening already with the visa rejections, right? So, this year we’ve had 900 students who were offered a place and a ticket to come here, but they weren’t able to secure… 

JOURNALIST: 900?  

MARGARET SHEIL: 900, yeah… 

JOURNALIST: Just QUT? 

MARGARET SHEIL: Just QUT, yeah, and that number’s bigger around the sector, and this in part is trying to address that uncertainty. So, Minister Clare is saying, we asked for more certainty, and we did. And I understand that’s part of the drive for this policy. 

JOURNALIST: I keep saying one last question, but this really is the last, is it possible that we’ll put off international students so much that we actually won’t end up with 270,000 in the country? They’ll think it’s all too hard, I’m going to Canada, I’m going to the UK, going to the US.  

MARGARET SHEIL: We’ll see some markets and we are seeing that already, so that the uncertainty around the visas and the increase in the visa charges is already starting to have an impact in some markets. 

JOURNALIST: So, we may not hit the 270,000? 

MARGARET SHEIL: It’s hard to know because the biggest market is China obviously, and then the Indian subcontinent. So, it’s not clear to me that having as much impact in China as some other policy settings there, but it’s certainly impacting in South Asia. 

JOURNALIST: Thank you so much for making time… 

ENDS