More problems in how international student caps have been allocated

As the sector prepares for the Senate Committee’s next and presumably final hearing into the changes to the ESOS Act which will allow Ministers to set caps on new international students, and as there are reports emerging that some providers have already had to halt student recruitment for Semester 1, 2025 – I have undertaken further analysis which identifies more problems with how the caps have been set.

These errors differ from those in my earlier post (22 September 2024) and impact three types of providers:

• VET providers with no enrolments in recent years
• Dual-sector providers, and
• Universities and their pathways partners

VET caps for providers with no enrolments

In evidence at the Senate Committee’s 6 September 2024 hearing into the ESOS Act legislative changes, officials from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations stated that they were allocating 4,560 places to “new providers” and added “those are ones already registered” to differentiate them from the “buffer of 4,000 commencements for those that are in the process of registration, based on the average … of apportioning around 30 commencements to each of these providers.”

So that’s 4,560 places for new providers (30 places each) and another 4,000 places for the 133 CRICOS VET providers not yet registered but which we can expect to gain registration in the next 15 months.

In my examination of the data provided by officials to the Senate, I find it difficult to replicate the figure of 4,560 new places (set at 30 per provider) for new providers.

There are 161 providers with a cap of 30 new international students for 2025. Of these:

• 26 providers enrolled international students in 2019 but have enrolled none subsequently – indicating they are not new providers. They are CRICOS providers which have been in operation for at least 6 years but recently have chosen to focus on either domestic VET students or on international higher education
• 4 providers enrolled only 1 or 2 international students in 2022 and none before or since – probably indicating international VET students are not a key component of their VET student profile (or they would have had their registration lapsed by ASQA for not enrolling new students in the last 12 months), and
• 2 providers which each enrolled 19 students in 2023 and none so far in 2024 (one commenced operations in 2019 and the other in 2022 – meaning neither are exactly new). The contrast between the provider which commenced in 2022, enrolled 19 students in 2023, and got a cap of 30 students – with just a couple of other providers which got lower caps despite one being newer and the other also commencing in 2022 but enrolling more students than the provider lucky enough to get a cap of 30 students are shown below. Regrettably there are many other similar anomalies of new and nearly new providers getting much lower caps than the 30 students allocated to Le Rosey Hospitality Institute)[1]

• a further 129 providers enrolled no new international students in either 2019, 2022, 2023 or 2024 YTD. They were all granted a cap for 2025 of 30 new students. Some are new providers, many are not:
  • 52 of the providers which did not enrol any new international VET students between 2019 and 2024 are genuinely new – ie they were registered between 2022 and 2024
  • the remaining 77 are not new providers – some of them are decades old (14 of them were first registered as an RTO in the 1990s). These are providers which have either built a significant domestic operation and are not currently focussed on educating international students (and hence have not done so for the past six years) or they are dual sector providers and have focussed their international education offerings on higher education (see below), or, at least in one case, they are purely a higher education provider and have somehow been confused with a VET provider of a similar name and hence should not have been included on the list of VET providers[2]
  • leaving aside the dual sector providers and the anomalous higher education provider, the 62 longstanding VET providers who have chosen not to enrol any international students in the past six years have collectively been allocated 1,860 new students for 2025. They clearly do not need and will not use these places.

Dual sector providers

The data shows five universities and 9 dual sector non-university higher education providers have also enrolled no international VET students between 2019 and 2024. They have been given caps allowing them each to enrol 30 new VET students in 2025.

The universities are:

• Deakin University – has 3 VET qualifications on its scope of registration – none have CRICOS approval
• Edith Cowan University – has 8 creative arts VET qualifications on scope – none have CRICOS approval
• La Trobe University – has 1 accredited VET course on scope – it does not have CRICOS approval
• The University of Notre Dame Australia – has 4 VET qualifications on scope – none have CRICOS approval
• University of Tasmania – has 11 maritime VET qualifications on scope – none have CRICOS approval.

The same pattern is true for the nine other dual sector providers with no enrolments between 2019 and 2024: Australian College of the Arts, Australian Institute of Management Education and Training, Engineering Institute of Technology, Navitas Professional Institute, Photography Holdings, Performing Arts Education, SAE Institute, The National Institute of Dramatic Art, and Whitehouse Institute.

Like the dual-sector universities listed above, none of these dual sectors providers have CRICOS approval for their VET qualifications and hence will not be able to use their cap of 30 VET students in 2025.

Collectively, that is a further 420 student places which will not be used.

Pathways providers

Pathways colleges specialising in helping new international students adjust to university life in a new country have become a staple of the Australian (and global) higher education landscape since 1994 when Rod Jones and Peter Larsen launched Perth Institute of Business and Technology (now Edith Cowan College) in partnership with Edith Cowan University.

When looked at through the lens of the proposed international student caps Australian university pathways partnerships take one of two forms:

• The partner is a standalone higher education provider with its own registration with TEQSA and hence its own CRICOS code (and in 2025 its own cap), or
• The partner is a separate legal entity but it does not have separate registration with TEQSA and hence its students are counted as the university’s enrolments (and will be within the university’s cap)

While we don’t have details of the pathways students enrolled as part of a university’s cap, we do have details of the partnerships involving providers with their own higher education and CRICOS registrations. And there could be problems for some of them depending on the cap they and their university partner have been allocated.

Here are a few scenarios:

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[1] Le Rosey Hospitality Institute Pty Ltd, Greenhill Institute Pty Ltd and Australia International Construction College Pty Ltd are not known to me. There may be valid reasons why the Department allocated them the caps that they did but the decision does not appear to be based on how new they are.

[2] The list of VET providers issued by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations includes Danford Higher Education Pty Ltd (CRICOS Code 04122B), row 740 on the list of providers. This institution is solely a higher education provider. It is not an RTO registered with ASQA, the VRQA or TAC and therefore should not have been included in the list of VET providers. It might have been confused with Danford College (the trading name of Star Gazers Pty Ltd, CRICOS Code 02996A) which is already included on the list of VET providers, row 50.