What does the new international student cap mean for universities?
New international student commencements will be capped at 270,000 for 2025, the Australian government announced this week.
In a statement released on Tuesday, ministers said they are ‘strengthening the integrity and sustainability of the international education sector’ by introducing a National Planning Level (NPL) for international students across HE and vocational education and training (VET).
The government have earmarked around 145,000 student commencements in the HE sector, and around 95,000 in the VET sector for 2025. The remaining 30,000 will be given to other providers.
However, individual limits for publicly funded universities have been outlined in an International Student Profile (ISP). This ISP uses data provided by institutions to calculate individual caps, meaning some universities could have lower allocated student numbers than others.
Professor Andrew Norton of the Australian National University has said these new limits are ‘likely to affect the more prestigious universities the most’, including the Group of Eight (Go8):
‘The caps have been calculated with 2019 pre-pandemic enrolments at each public university as their base. For universities who increased their enrolments of international students between 2019 and 2023 a formula applies, depending on their “international concentration”. This is based on the percentage of their enrolments in Australian campuses who are international students.
‘Universities with low concentrations of international student can have all their growth to 2023 included in their 2025 cap. However universities with concentrations above 37% will get to keep only 50% of their growth.’
Go8 Chief Executive Vicki Thomson has dubbed the move ‘reckless’:
‘The Federal Government announced that it intends recklessly to proceed with international student caps – introducing cuts to Go8 members who do the heavy lifting in research, education as well as underpinning Australia’s global reputation as a high-quality international education provider.
‘As such, the Group of Eight (Go8) remains implacably opposed to international student caps for the damage they will do to the sector and the nation.’
