Australia Announces New Caps on International Students Starting 2025

The Education Minister of Australia, Jason Clare has announced an Australia student visa cap. As per the announcement made on August 27, 2024, the Ministry of Education Australia has limited the enrollment number of international students in Australia to 270,000 for the year 2025. This decision at the moment is seeking parliamentary approval. The new number has hit the lowest in the last 5 years with the last being 561,000 for the international students who enrolled in the year 2023.

According to the recent Australia student visa news, the country has been consistently facing a housing crisis with rising rents due to higher migration levels in the country. There has also been a recent increase in the Australia visa processing fees which was doubled from AUD 710 to AUD 1600 starting from July’24. 

This new Australia student visa cap allows publicly funded universities in Australia to maintain the international student intake at 145,000. The Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector will be admitting around 95,000 new students. Other private universities and non-university course providers will be allowed to admit around 30,000 students. 

Students who are enrolled in school programs, research degrees and English Language Courses aren’t impacted and are exempted from this cap. This also includes government-sponsored students and scholarship students. This change follows recent stricter requirements for international students, such as higher IELTS scores and the Genuine Student Test, aimed at refining the country's migration system.

Student Caps in Other Countries?

Canada also put a cap on international student visas by limiting the issuance of visa permits in the year 2024. This helped them cut the new enrollments by 35%. Along with this, even the UK government had limited the migration rate by restricting the students from bringing their dependents (families, spouses, children). This led to a drop of 16% in the UK visa applications.

Australia's Previous Approach: Earlier, Australia's strategy included denying many student visa applications, which disproportionately affected students from certain countries and smaller universities. This approach did not align well with the goal of diversifying the student population. 

The holistic view of this new approach will be visible in a few months as the effects of the new Australia student visa cap show over time. The future policies for Australian student visas and visa applications will be based on the negotiations between the Australian Tertiary Education Commission and other educational institutions. This approach represents a stricter road taken by the Australian government although this is a more structured technique to help the country cope with the migration problem.