One-size-fits-all caps fails Australia, fails our students

The Albanese government has made a kneejerk decision to cap the number of international students coming to Australia’s universities. Amid the uncertainty created by the government’s intended caps, some voices in the sector have weighed in to suggest uniform upper limits on the percentage of international students universities should be allowed to enrol.

While administratively simple, these suggestions would be disastrous for the entire Australian tertiary education sector, and would drastically curtail future students’ choice and access to quality education. They would also shift the financial burden of paying for the expansion of tertiary education as foreshadowed in the Australian Universities Accord Report onto the taxpayer and/or Australian students, who are already concerned by spiralling levels of student debt.

Imposing a flat 35% or 40% international student cap on all Australian universities, as some have suggested, will inevitably reduce the overall quality of Australia’s tertiary education system. It will immediately affect the country’s top-ranking universities, forcing them to cut thousands of international student places and forego hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The staff cuts, infrastructure upgrade deferrals, research foregone, and reductions in diversity-promoting scholarships will have to be immediate – and will be lasting.

Ultimately the impact will fall on Australian students. Because of the way university finances work, universities with major falls in international student numbers will have to cut costs much more than the reduction in work required to teach fewer students. In practical terms this means higher student-teacher ratios, larger class sizes, less access to labs, libraries and facilities, and aging infrastructure – a poorer experience for Australian students.

It is fanciful to think that international students who miss out on their Australian university of choice will simply choose another Australian university that hasn’t reached its cap. There is extensive data that shows that international students prefer to study in large, cosmopolitan cities. If they can’t get into a university in one of Australia’s cosmopolitan cities, they will go to another country.

Imposing the sort of draconian solution that hits some universities hard while leaving others unaffected will put the whole sector into a downward spiral. Australia currently has more of its universities in the global top-100 than any other country except for the US and UK. This is well understood by international students who are very rankings-driven, and it translates into a strong national reputation for higher education. Australia consistently ranks in the top 3 preferred education destinations among students and parents in countries that send the most students abroad. This translates into more international students for the whole sector in Australia.

But a uniform cap will lead to an inevitable fall in our reputation as one of the world’s most desirable higher education providers. Universities forced to cut their operations by hundreds of millions of dollars will fall in almost every measure that determines their rankings – from research performance, to staff-student ratios, to international research collaborations, to academic reputation. In the space of a few years, Australia could well have no universities in the global top 100. As we surrender our reputation as a world class education destination, international student demand will fall for all Australian universities, with lower revenues translating into even lower rankings, leading to even softer demand. Canada’s decision to cap international student numbers has seen it fall quickly as a preferred destination in less than a year.

Maintaining world class universities is not a vanity project for Australia. It is vital to our national future. Think about the benefits that other countries derive from their world class universities: automatic membership of global networks of discovery and innovation; the ongoing ability to attract the best and brightest from around the globe; profile as a society of intellectual and cultural excellence; workforces that are highly educated and therefore attractive locations for the industries of the future. Ask yourself why China, Singapore, Korea, India and the Gulf states are pouring billions of dollars into building world class higher education sectors.

Arbitrary, uniform caps across all Australian universities will in effect mean ripping resources out of the sector at a time when the Universities Accord warns we need to double the number of students we educate by 2050. With fewer academics, no new classrooms, labs, libraries and IT systems, who will teach all of these new students? What cost to the taxpayer and student debt?

If you think I am being alarmist, have a quick look at Britain and Canada, countries that succumbed to populist paranoia about temporary upswings in migration and imposed caps on international students. The picture is downright alarming: stagnating and falling wages; spiralling academic workloads; industrial unrest that falls on students’ education and experience; and plummeting morale. British colleagues despair that the damage can ever be reversed.

This is something that should concern every Australian – where short-term populist politics inflicts lasting damage to our country and the opportunities of future generations. If we must have international student caps, they should be tailored to each particular university’s profile in order to avoid doing irreparable damage to the whole sector.

By Professor Michael Wesley, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Global, Culture and Engagement)

First published in The Australian on 10 July 2024.