Australia urged to tweak visas so international students stay

“Minor tweaks” to visa settings would convince more international graduates to settle in Australia and reverse a “self-inflicted brain drain”, according to the representative body for universities.

John Wellard, international policy director with Universities Australia, said the country needed to emulate its northern competitors in enabling more foreign students to become permanent citizens.

“Britain, Canada and the United States [are] streamlining processes and incentivising global talent to settle,” Dr Willard told the Australia China Education and Tourism Symposium. “They’re smoothing out the lumps in the migration pathways.

“They still have legitimate, strong, robust visa systems, but they’re making it simple for people…to undertake those processes. We need to do the same to attract the skills and talents we need here in Australia. A modest increase in permanent skilled visas going to international students would get our regional towns and capital cities the engineers, nurses, doctors and teachers they are crying [out] for.”

The conference heard that just 16 per cent of foreign students remain permanently in Australia. Among Chinese students, most of whom attend the top-ranking Group of Eight (Go8) universities, the proportion who stay on is 14 per cent.

Dr Willard said these figures could be increased by “removing some of the speed bumps”, such as a requirement for graduates to apply for post-study work visas. “They have to wait; they can’t apply for a job until they get the visa. [We should] make that almost like a flag fall process where if you graduate [and] meet the character requirements, you just get it as a matter of course.”

Australia should also introduce “international knowledge visas” to fill specified workforce gaps, Dr Willard said, while visa processing should be “more transparent [so that] people understand where they sit in the queues”.

“In isolation, they’re fairly simple things,” he said. “In aggregate, they can be quite transformative. There are no shades of grey with the migration settings. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach, and I think that’s been detrimental to the system.”

Dr Willard said Australia had more international students in its universities than at any other time in its history, yet “we’re currently facing our worst skills crisis since the 1960s. Covid-19 has fuelled the problem, limiting the flow of skilled workers into Australia. It has served as a reminder that a homegrown workforce alone is not enough to meet our workforce needs and spur economic growth.”

He said the country had “an opportunity now to address this” through the government’s new migration strategy, due to be released by the end of the year.

Go8 chief executive Vicki Thomson said Australian employers needed to “rethink what constitutes the ideal quality graduate” and “abolish the bamboo ceiling”.

“We can no longer think of international students only as a short-term fix to fill a skill shortage,” she told the symposium. “We must be more open-minded and ask them to be here longer – as long as they wish.”

She said Chinese graduates could “contribute to a deeper understanding of China” while bolstering the Australian economy. “It’s not the time for the too-hard basket, nor for a China knowledge deficit. China is our largest trading partner, and we must find ways to know China better.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com