Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\nHe said regional universities primarily recruited students from south Asian countries, which were experiencing higher visa refusal rates of about 53%.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not only resulting in us losing what we believe to be largely genuine students \u2026 but it\u2019s also creating a large deterrent from new students to come in and apply, knowing they\u2019re having to pay world record visa fees with only a one in two chance of actually getting a visa,\u201d Ferguson said.<\/p>\n
But he said the university does support Labor\u2019s decision to crack down on onshore student transfers and visa hopping to improve integrity in the system.<\/p>\n
Prof Andrew Norton, an expert in higher education, said the declining numbers were affecting all public universities because they cross-subsidise their teaching and research with international student fees.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt creates massive problems because international students are basically the only profitable aspect of university operations,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Duncan Bentley, vice-chancellor of Federation University in regional Victoria, said he too supported those measures but that his university was also facing significant pressures with far fewer international students enrolling this year.<\/p>\n
The university has pushed the government for a special regional skills student visa that would prioritise international students wanting to do courses in critical areas such as allied health or teaching.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe endorse, and have been asking for a long time for, the 12-month ban on course hopping, apart from exceptional and genuine circumstances,\u201d Bentley said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe criteria for this regional visa would be any overseas student who wants to come and study in a regional university can have access to a special visa \u2026 the course should be on a regional skills shortage list, based on the premise that domestic regional graduates can\u2019t meet the demand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Western Sydney University vice-chancellor, George Williams, said his university had also experienced significant declines in overseas students and warned the financial deficits could have an impact on domestic students.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has an enormous impact on our budget and it means universities across the sector are asking where they can save money, where they can pull back,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn our case, international students heavily subsidise domestic students, and it puts real pressure on the services we can offer to domestic students.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams also said international students were being deterred by the heated political debate, \u201cwhich would lead people to wonder whether they would be welcome in Australia\u201d.<\/p>\n
Adelaide University told the ABC in September it had only reached 60% of its international student capacity, after its merger with the University of South Australia, creating a potential $90m revenue shortfall.<\/p>\n
The government\u2019s 2026 planning level for international students was set at 295,000, and so far it\u2019s tracking towards 250,000, which is just above the Coalition\u2019s proposed level of 240,000.<\/p>\n
Labor will also reduce the number of international students eligible to bring family to Australia while they study, while the Coalition has promised to abolish temporary graduate visas.<\/p>\n
Phil Honeywood, chief executive of the International Education Association of Australia (IEAA), said diminishing international student numbers in regional areas could also lead to critical skills shortages.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe high non-refundable visa cost makes the system more like a lottery ticket,\u201d Honeywood said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s not enough nurses, childcare workers, aged care workers or engineers in regional communities \u2026 so basically if you have diminishing numbers of international students in these regional areas and they\u2019re not able to stay past their degrees, that creates a cascading skill shortage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"University leaders warn they\u2019re struggling to fill international student places due to visa uncertainty and heated political debate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":923464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-923463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/923464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}