Australian Government tries hard to revive the International students’ inflow

Australian education industry has witnessed an 8.7% drop in international enrolments, with the number of oversees students, particularly Indians, reporting a sharp fall. The hardest hit enrolments were recorded in the vocational education and English language areas, where numbers fell more than 21% on March last year.

The enrolments from India are worst hit and the figures indicates that in the 9 months period (July 2010 to March 2011), only about 2200 Indian students entered Australia indicating a fall of 93% plus for Vocational Education and Training Sector (6870 to 465) and 65% plus for Higher Education (4637 to 1586). 

Apart from attributing the drop to 'safety issues of Indian students', many education experts have also blamed Australian government for tightening immigration laws that were leading to the drop in student enrolments.

Rajni Bhatla, Director of Kampus Landing a leading overseas education consultant from India says, “Inspite of Australian government announcing some easy student visa norms for the Indian students and accepting TOEFL, PTE and ESOL test scores for English but all this has failed to boost the Australian market. There are hardly any enquiries at the study abroad agents’ offices from the interested students.”

IDP Education has proposed a change which would help a group of trusted universities to fast track visa approvals for their students. This also helps Australian immigration authorities run the system more efficiently as well as control visa breaches.


In a submission to the student visa review released by former Olympics minister in the NSW government Michael Knight, IDP said "The key role of the trusted provider would be to assess the bona fides of the student, their qualifications for the course and their financial capacity."
IDP suggested that visa approvals should be faster and more certain for students whose assessment is positive. This would avoid the more burdensome requirements which are currently applied to assess financial capacity in high-risk countries.


According to IDP, this change would reduce visa processing delays that make Australia lose genuine students to rival countries. Also, the change would give education providers a strong incentive to look out for and act on visa breaches.


Education institutions would need a good track record in student retention and visa compliance to be considered trusted providers. To have visas approved within two weeks, all their students would be vetted under the Immigration Department's least rigorous assessment level.
IDP also recommended using more face-to-face interviews to speed up assessment.