National Planning Level – new international student caps: which institution gets what level cap?

On 20 September 2024 – Federal government Ministers provided Senators with data on the proposed international student caps for each higher education and VET provider, in response to an official ‘order for the production of documents’ from Senators. The documents are available to download at: 

• Higher education international student cap statistics and related documents: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Tabled_Documents/7455
• VET international student cap statistics: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Tabled_Documents/7454

In reviewing the data provided by the government I have identified a number of anomalies – and have published my analysis on my website: https://clairefield.com.au/unpacking-the-international-student-caps-for-each-provider/

If you’re interested in my developing analysis of the data as it was progressively released this is as published first on 1 September and then with additional details on 19 September:

Recently the Australian government announced some of the details of the new caps on commencing international students it intends to introduce if legislation currently before the parliament passes.

Some students and sectors will be exempt and the caps are focussed on higher education and VET providers.

Different methodologies have been used to calculate the caps for public ‘Table A’ universities and private ‘Table B’ universities,  other non-university higher education providers (NUHEPs), and across the VET sector.

Below are the caps for the universities and they show a number of anomalies across different types of universities and when comparing 2019 and 2023 commencements with the Indicative Student Profiles (student caps) each institution has been given.

While provider-level caps have not been made publicly available outside the public university sector – I have now looked at the data on the TAFE sector as a whole, the whole private VET sector and the private higher education.

It shows that collectively, when compared to their 2019 and 2023 new international student commencements, each of these groups of providers will have significantly lower caps for 2025.

• TAFE Institutes have been given a cap for 2025  which is -50% below 2019 commencements and -29% below 2023 new commencements
• Private VET providers collectively have a cap for 2025 which is -46% below 2019 levels and -54% below 2023 new commencements, and
• Private universities and other private higher education providers will have a cap for 2025 which is -15% below 2019 new commencements and -30% below 2023 figures.

Senators enquiring into the ESOS Act changes have issued an order for the production of documents providing detailed provider-level information on new international student commencements, domestic and international student enrolments and the proportion of international students for all VET providers and higher education providers (including the public universities).

This data will inform the Senate Committee’s understanding of how the proposed caps have been set and the impact they will have on different providers. It is unclear if any of the data produced in accordance with these orders will be made publicly available.

Below are the current details Department of Education officials have provided on each of the public universities:

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On Friday 6 September 2024 officials from the Department of Education tabled data on the caps (Indicative Student Profiles) each public university will be given.

This data has been incorporated into the table below and collectively public universities will be able to enrol up to a maximum of 145,200 commencing onshore international students in 2025.

The caps will have a differential impact, depending not just on different types of universities but even across universities of the same type, for example:

• the 2025 caps for the mostly inner-city ATN universities are collectively up 3% on their 2023 new commencements, while the mostly suburban Innovative Research Universities are collectively down -6%
• comparing universities of the same type: within the research-intensive Group of Eight universities, the ANU is down -14% when comparing 2023 to 2025, while Monash University is up 20%
• across the regional universities: the University of Southern Queensland’s cap for 2025 is the same as their new commencements in 2023 (ie a 0% shift), while the University of the Sunshine Coast will be able to enrol more than twice as many new students in 2025 as they did in 2023 (+108%).

The 2025 caps exclude higher degree by research students, students undertaking standalone English language courses, non-award students, Australian Government sponsored scholars, students that are part of an Australian transnational education arrangement or twinning arrangement, key partner foreign government scholarship holders, and students from the Pacific and Timor-Leste.  That is higher education providers will be able to enrol above their caps in 2025 if they are enrolling students from these cohorts.

Private universities and NUHEPs will have a cap for 2025 of 30,500 new international students, and in the Senate hearing on Friday 6 June we heard from two very different types of NUHEPs:

• a very large predominantly international education provider: Holmes Institute which has been in operation for 40 years and as a higher education provider for 20 years, had 8,600 students pre-pandemic offering 6 Masters degrees and 6 Bachelor degrees and they operate a cybersecurity research and innovation centre which has produced a patent and has a cybersecurity grant from the Federal government to develop executive courses in cyber awareness for the water industry…. They have been given a cap for 2025 of just 980 students, meaning they are likely to need to make up to half their staff (approx. 100) redundant across their four campuses (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast), and
• the much smaller, mostly domestic fee-for-service provider, Photography Studies College, which has been in operation for 50 years. It gained CRICOS registration a few years ago with a small cap of just 20 students and was building their CRICOS numbers, had invested in a new facility just before COVID, and then got approval for a revised CRICOS cap of 100 students – and are now in the middle of efforts to build up to that number. Their students come from across the OECD and ASEAN: Japan, Korea, the US, Canada, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Slovakia and Italy (and they are also approved by the US Department of Veterans Affairs to deliver funded bachelor degrees to US veterans). They received a cap of just 5 students for 2025…

VET providers initially received less information than higher education providers about their caps. They have now received their ISPs and collectively in 2025 VET providers will be able to enrol 94,500 new international students.

What we learned from evidence given in the Senate Committee hearing on 6 September is that they have been allocated as follows:

• specialist international providers (ie those with 80% or more international students), have been given 61,505 new commencements
• 18,953 new commencements for non-specialist providers (ie under 80% of their students are internationals)
• TAFEs will get 5,482 commencements
• new providers will get 4,560, (these are new providers which are already registered), and
• they’re keeping a buffer of 4,000 commencements for those that are in the process of registration (and they’ll get approximately 30 commencements each, based on the historical average of around 24 (in a provider’s first year))

Below is the table of higher education caps, and this week week I will be adding a new table of VET data as I see providers publish details of their caps on social media and in traditional media (some have already started to do so and I am compiling this data currently).

Date sources:

*The 2019 higher education overseas students’ data as published by the Department of Education’ (Section 7 Overseas students)https://www.education.gov.au/higher-education-statistics/resources/2019-section-7-overseas-students

The TCSI data was tabled by Department of Education officials in a recent hearing by the Senate Standing Committee on Education and Employment in the Committee’s examination of changes to the ESOS Act. The indicative International Student Profiles (ISPs) were included in the same document tabled in the recent Senate hearing: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Education_and_Employment/OverseasStudents/Additional_Documents?docType=Tabled%20Documents

** The detail in The Australian where this figure is sourced from says “non-university higher education providers can recruit 30,500 students” but the joint Ministerial media release states “For other universities and for non-university higher education providers, in aggregate, their new international student commencements in 2025 will be around 30,000.”

Other data in the table comes from the following media articles:

The Australian: data on the Group of Eight Universities, NUHEPs, Charles Darwin University, the University of Tasmania

Australian Financial Review(a): Australian Catholic University

Australian Financial Review(b): Charles Darwin University, the University of Newcastle, the University of Tasmania, the University of Wollongong

The West Australian: Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University, and the University of Western Australia

The Age(a): Deakin University and La Trobe University

The Age(b): UTS

Sydney Morning Herald: Newcastle University

ASX-notice: Ikon Institute