The federal government will cap the number of foreign students who can study in Australia next year. The limit will be set at 270,000.
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00:00It's fair to say the entire university sector has been sweating on this announcement.
00:06There have been predictions of job losses as well as a broader hit to the economy.
00:10The tourism sector and business groups have been among those expressing concern.
00:14The Education Minister, Jason Clare, says that the figures he's announced today show
00:19that international education is not going to take a huge hit in Australia, that numbers
00:24will be, for 2025, will be broadly similar to 2023.
00:29As you mentioned, the headline figure is 270,000 international students total.
00:36For public universities, their share of that is about 145,000, with the rest made up of
00:43private universities or private vocational education providers.
00:48The Minister hasn't given us a breakdown of how individual universities are affected.
00:52He said that letters are going out right now to vice chancellors setting out those figures
00:57and they'll be finalised ahead of the legislation going to Parliament in about two weeks.
01:04For some universities, some big universities, it'll be lower than it was last year.
01:08For some of the smaller universities, some of the universities that have been hit hard
01:14by Ministerial Direction 107, it'll be higher next year than it is this year.
01:19So it's designed to build a better and a fairer system.
01:22The fact is, the universities I mentioned, like Newcastle, like Wollongong, like Griffith,
01:28like Charles Darwin, like La Trobe, like the University of Tasmania, they're the sort of
01:32universities that have borne the brunt of Ministerial Direction 107.
01:37They're the sort of universities that will benefit from building a better and a fairer
01:40way of setting levels for universities and international students.
01:45In the past, the government playbook with universities has been to divide and conquer.
01:49As the Minister alluded to there, he says that some universities are actually going
01:54to do better out of this announcement than they have done in the past.
01:57However, we know some universities are very likely to have their numbers reduced.
02:03The universities that are most likely to be feeling the pinch are the University of Sydney
02:08and the University of Melbourne, who have a very high percentage of their total student
02:12body from overseas.
02:14We don't have those figures confirmed yet, though.
02:16Like everyone else, we're waiting for the individual university announcements, so we
02:21expect that there will be some parts of the university sector who will be okay with this
02:26and others who will be very upset.
02:28And privately, they've told me that there could be job losses and that there could be
02:33a broader hit to the economy in places where international students are very important
02:39for getting the economy going.