Jackie Saentos is in a quandary. The Nepalese engineer has just finished a master’s course at Central Queensland University’s Sydney campus and is wondering what to do next. An educational adviser says he should buff up his chances of securing Australian residency by doing a PhD. Saentos thinks it is time to apply his skills and learn on the job. “I’m already almost 30,” he told 糖心Vlog. “I…have a fair bit of experience in engineering fieldwork.”
He has done a few interviews, but engineering posts are hard to secure. He senses a don’t-call-us, we’ll-call-you vibe. The alternative is to look for work back home. It is a tough decision. “So far, it’s 50-50,” he said.
Saentos was lured overseas by the promise of a “great future” by US, European and, particularly, Australian universities. However, his degree – management for engineers – had too much management and too little engineering for his liking. And while he had hoped for the “cultural exchange” provided by a rich diversity of classmates, he found himself studying mostly with other South Asians. “I wouldn’t say [I was] disappointed, but I was expecting more,” he said.
Covering his expenses was not easy. Fees started at about A$13,000 (?6,200) a term, rising several hundred dollars each time. Saentos paid in advance for the first term’s fees and started saving straight away to cover the second term. He supplemented restaurant work with cleaning and construction shifts – 24 hours of paid work a week, on top of his studies, to cover tuition, rent and other bills.
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“Third semester was where I struggled,” he said. “I called…my parents, which I really hate to do.” They paid half his semester fee, and then a term break of several months allowed him to get his finances back in order by cranking up his paid work to about 65 hours a week.
The experience was “bittersweet”, Saentos admitted. Work colleagues were “really nice”, but some of his treatment by restaurant management was “horrible”. He found solace by joining an improvisational theatre group that met on Tuesdays, his only day off. “It was…my way to get away from everything. I just wish that there [were] eight days a week so I could rest.”
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His fees are all paid now, but staying on in Australia will not be cheap either. His application for a temporary graduate visa will cost about A$2,300. A language test will set him back about A$500. Mandatory health insurance will cost perhaps A$700 a year. He will also need a police check and, possibly, a skills assessment by the accrediting body for engineers. All up, “five grand, or probably seven”, he estimates.
Australian international education has changed since its emergence at scale under last century’s , an international aid scheme that educated generations of regional leaders at Australia’s expense. enrolled in Australian universities as private overseas students, benefiting from introduced in the 1950s and the elimination of tuition fees during the 1970s.
These days, the conversation has flipped from what Australia can do for overseas students to what overseas students can do for Australia. That sentiment drove a string of policy changes during the coronavirus pandemic, as Australia sought to fill local workforce gaps by loosening restrictions on overseas students’ paid work during term time.
First, in March 2020, the then 40-hour fortnightly limit was removed for students working at . Similar exemptions were applied to students working in aged and disability care, and agriculture, before, in January 2022, restrictions were removed for . Working hours remained uncapped until July 2023, when a new was imposed.
But Australia’s attitude towards international students reversed in late 2023, when housing shortages replaced workforce gaps as a primary political concern. A dozen or so new rules were introduced to deter rather than attract foreign students. They included a 125 per cent increase in the non-refundable student visa application fee to A$1,600 – then the highest in the world.
The May 2025 federal election prompted a new round of policy changes, as the major political parties looked to international students to help bankroll their campaign promises. The governing Labor Party estimated that another visa fee hike – this time to A$2,000 – would contribute A$760 million, while the Liberal-National opposition went further, proposing visa fees of up to A$5,000 to underwrite election pledges to the tune of almost A$3.1 billion. The coalition also pledged to loosen students’ working hour limits again, this time to 60 hours a fortnight, to generate an estimated A$417 million in additional tax revenue.
According to Flinders University vice-chancellor Colin Stirling, Australian international education can still deliver the soft diplomacy benefits evident in the Colombo Programme’s heyday. Three current Indonesian cabinet ministers – human development and cultural affairs minister Pratikno, primary and secondary education minister Abdul Mu’Ti and state apparatus and bureaucratic reform minister Rini Widyantini – are Flinders alumni. “We build relationships that last a lifetime,” Stirling says.
However, recent visa processing delays have undermined the goodwill from previous decades, Stirling worries. Last year’s ministerial direction 107, for instance, deliberately delayed visas for institutions deemed immigration risks. “The people I felt for were the 500 students who had applied to Flinders, been offered a place, accepted [and] paid to come,” Stirling said. “Then they applied for the visa and their visa application didn’t even get processed. Obviously, we refunded their fees…but the opportunity they were choosing was denied…It’s awful to see us being portrayed as not welcoming of international students because that’s absolutely not the case.”
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While politicians occasionally depend on overseas students to help balance the books, universities’ reliance is bolted in. Of the A$42 billion earned last year by the 33 publicly funded universities that had published their 2024 accounts when this story went to press, A$12.3 billion, or 29 per cent, came from international education.
Charles Sturt University vice-chancellor Renée Leon that without cross-subsidies from foreign tuition fees, her institution would struggle to support disadvantaged Australian students or run key programmes – in disciplines including medicine, physiotherapy and veterinary science – where the combination of government subsidies and local students’ fees does not cover costs.
“The simple truth of Australian higher education is that international student revenue pays for domestic students and research,” Leon said.
Nor is Australia’s case unique of course. Philip Altbach, professor emeritus at the Center for International 糖心Vlog at Boston College, said universities in all “anglosphere” countries “rely on tuition fees from international students to balance the budget. That wasn’t the case even a few decades ago.” And that has made international education “much more of a business. Ethics, alas, play no role in this business. The financial aspect trumps most everything.”
Jack Goodman, founder of study support company Studiosity, believes Australia’s approach to international students has become too “extractive”. That view was reinforced during a recent visit to Kathmandu, where he was stunned at the fervour of student recruitment, particularly by Australian universities.
“You see signs everywhere,” he said. However, “Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. [It] really can’t afford to lose all of these bright young people…It’s brain drain, and it’s potentially catastrophic.”
He said Nepalese people could only afford to spend time in Australia by working full time while they studied, and possibly by switching to cheaper courses. “If Australian universities really want to support the higher education ambitions of Nepal, they should…set up a campus in Kathmandu to support those students. But I would guess that’s low down on people’s lists.
“There’s something going on here that’s not entirely [healthy],” he says. “I think it’s something that the sector needs to talk about.”
In fact, the sector often talks about it, according to International Education Association of Australia (IEAA) CEO Phil Honeywood. The meets twice a year to discuss issues like brain drain, he says.
The network’s member groups, which come from six continents, discuss the merits of scholarships or job fairs that require or encourage globetrotting students to go home after studying. And Honeywood said the imperative to shepherd “bright young graduates” back to their home countries was one of the motivating factors behind Canberra’s about-turn on international education policy.
Australia’s centre-left government has close ties with international labour organisations, by whose leaders these issues are “well understood and discussed”, he said. At the same time, advanced economies are also competing for talent in areas where they lack domestic workers, such as allied health, engineering and information technology. Rich countries’ concerns for their neighbours’ talent needs are “diluted” by this “global skills race”, he conceded: “It’s a difficult balancing act. There’s no easy answer.”
Japan is another good example, Honeywood said. It is offering overseas students scholarships to learn Japanese and work in Honshu’s car manufacturing industry because “They just don’t have enough domestic students coming through the pipeline.” But according to Hiroshima University international education expert Futao Huang, students from struggling regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, faced “significant financial and academic pressures” when they came to Japan. Programmes for these students “should not be driven solely by the agendas of host countries”, he said.
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“International student recruitment must be grounded in a longer-term view of human capacity development, not just short-term institutional or national gains. When countries like Nepal…see a significant share of their educated youth leave – often under high financial strain – it risks deepening inequalities rather than alleviating them.”
Huang said host institutions should consider introducing “targeted support mechanisms” – such as need-based scholarships, flexible work-study options and psychosocial support – “to ensure these students don’t bear disproportionate burdens”. He also advocated investment in branch campuses to help develop educational capacity within the “sending countries”.
But when universities depend on international student revenue to underwrite their operations at home, it is hard for them to find the resources – or motivation – to shell out on branch campuses offshore. “The bind is very real, and it’s not easily resolved,” Huang conceded. But government or philanthropic co-funding can help, he said.
Some Japanese and Korean scholarship schemes are supported by public diplomacy or corporate social responsibility funds, he said. “These are not always large-scale, but they send an important signal and can be scaled over time. The goal isn’t to ask universities to carry all the burden, but to help reposition the ethical treatment of international students as part of a broader ecosystem responsibility, where governments, industries and communities all have a stake.”
For Australian migration expert Abul Rizvi, the most ethical thing universities can do is provide good education. That requires them to be extremely selective about the students they admit.
Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the federal Department of Immigration, said Australia’s post-Covid student surge stranded “a very large number” of people in “immigration limbo” as they applied for limited numbers of permanent residence places. Australia’s low unemployment meant most were employed, “but…they’re not getting particularly skilled jobs, and they’re not finding a way through into the migration programme”.
The situation would be different if universities accepted only academically gifted students with the equivalent of an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank of 80 or better, Rizvi said. “The odds are, if you got less than that, you will struggle to get a skilled job [or] permanent residence. You’ll just get stuck in limbo, which is not good for you and it’s not good for us.”
Conversely, Australia can help “good students” by “giving them good-quality education. We can give them pathways to permanent residence in Australia [or] wherever they want to live in the world. Once you have a really good education, you’ve got lots of options.”
Reliance on tuition fees makes it difficult for Australian universities to be very selective around international admissions, of course. But unless vice-chancellors “push good policy in this space, they’ll just constantly be at war with the government – which is where they are at the moment, and that’s not helping them or the government”, Rizvi said.
Not that he approves of the “obscene” visa fee hikes with which the government has responded to mushrooming international student numbers, observing that “We’re probably charging 10 times what [visa administration] actually costs,” he said. “If you tried to do something like this [to] Aussies, there’d be an outcry.”
Canberra gets away with it because visa fees are treated legally as a “tax” rather than a cost recovery measure – the legacy of a late 20th-century court battle over departure charges. But Rizvi said it was “entirely unethical” for the government to extract thousands of dollars from the citizens of low-income neighbours by charging exorbitant application fees.
“It’s also bad policy, because a high visa application charge – contrary to what the government says – will more likely deter good students than ordinary students. Good students have options. They can go to different countries much more readily.”
Murdoch University physicist Gerd Schr?der-Turk said government and universities alike have been “seduced” by the “easy money” offered by international education, leaving them “oblivious” to the social implications. Nor are the students’ motives entirely pure, he added. While there was “a convenient pretence” that the internationalisation of student bodies is about education, “both students and universities know that it’s often not. How much demand for international education would there be if the promise of work rights were removed?”
Nevertheless, he questioned the ethics of overcharging international students – particularly those from economically struggling countries – for degrees to cross-subsidise activities of no benefit to them. “In institutions that trade in integrity and truth, an end can never justify an unethical means,” Schr?der-Turk said. “Universities need to take the moral high ground…I would like to see minutes of governing board meetings show evidence of consideration of these higher principles, rather than of mere revenue numbers.”
However, Schr?der-Turk’s efforts to bring the potential pitfalls of such an approach to Murdoch’s attention six years ago, when he was a member of the university’s senate, did not go well. A bitter legal dispute resulted from his claim in an ABC TVs investigation that the university was addressing its budgetary problems by accepting Indian students with inadequate English language capabilities, resulting in a wave of cheating and desperation. The action included an attempt by the university’s then leaders to sue Schr?der-Turk for financial damages.
He told THE that he recognised that university administrators were in a difficult position because they relied on international education income to pay for infrastructure, low-enrolment degrees and indirect research costs. But universities could help themselves by cutting down on wasteful practices, he said.
“A sense-check on inflated centralised budgets, overblown advertisement costs, costly research-only centres, bloated course portfolios and vanity building projects…would probably improve rather than lessen quality,” he said.
So, he added, would stronger scrutiny of enrolment trends and what they might imply about integrity. Administrators should be particularly wary of spectacular increases in revenue from particular nationalities or a few courses, Schr?der-Turk said: “If something looks too good to be true, it usually is.”
That maxim is also applicable to students. Saentos, the Nepalese engineer, “wouldn’t say I was exploited” in Australia, but was “definitely naive in thinking that being in a First World country would make it easy to immerse myself. I learned the hard way that immersing yourself in a new world can feel a lot like drowning – unless you figure out how to swim and adapt quickly.”
Luckily for him, he did figure that out. “Some of the difficult and even nasty moments I had to endure weren’t things I expected – but I guess that’s life. You learn, adapt and move forward.” And, as “someone who’s always searching for creative experiences and ways to experiment”, he would do it all again.
But would he recommend the “all right” Australian educational experience to others back in Nepal?
“Only if they’re mentally prepared for the full experience,” he said. “The highs and the lows.”
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