As if we needed any more reason to bulldoze the universities and start over again, here’s another: the ‘international student’ scam.
Australian universities are as dependent on full-fee-paying international students as a junkie looking for his next heroin fix. But like all addictions, its downsides are many and deplorable. Academic standards are continually dumbed down to pander to students who can barely speak or read English. Authoritarian regimes like China are able to not just actively spy on students, but directly influence course content and even push universities to expel political enemy students.
But the most damnable fact about the ‘international student’ scam is that it has fast become little more than a backdoor mass-migration program.
It’s long been the case that millions of people arrive as ‘students’ and simply never leave. More and more, though, they’re not even bothering to pretend that they’re students at all.
Foreign students from Africa, Pakistan and India have been reported missing from universities, kicking off a political blame game over immigration “rorts and shonks’’ during the election campaign, after one institution revealed half its international students had dropped out or failed to show up.
Phantom students have been exposed by the Queensland University of Technology, which revealed nearly half its foreign students had dropped out of their first year of study. “The retention rate for international students dropped to an unusual and historic low of 53.6 per cent because of an unusually high number of students who did not meaningfully engage from the outset,’’ it states in its 2024 annual report.
Is anyone even pretending to be surprised, here? We all knew this was going on. The only surprising thing is that they’re actually admitting it.
Fresh evidence that some foreigners are paying for student visas to gain entry to Australia with work rights, only to drop out of university, comes as Labor and the coalition campaign to limit the international student intake […]
During the election campaign, the coalition has announced a $2500 visa transfer fee to discourage foreign students “course-hopping” from universities to other education providers.
And if they simply never turn up? Instant deportation ought to be the default response.
Which won’t happen, of course: not while the universities are raking it in off the backs of these grifters.
International students are a lucrative source of revenue for cash-strapped universities, with QUT charging $45,000 a year for its engineering degree, and $36,400 a year for a bachelor of business.
QUT would not say how much money it had collected from the missing students, how many had left or where they had gone.
It also refused to reveal the students’ countries of origin, and whether it had reported the issue to the federal departments of Education or Home Affairs.
Somebody’s gotta pay for those million-dollar vice-chancellor salaries.
Because it certainly won’t be the Australian students. Thanks to the ‘international student’ scam, they’ll be lucky to even find somewhere to live.
Foreign students occupy seven per cent of rental housing as Australians struggle with soaring rents in capital cities, new government data reveals.
The federal Education Department estimates that 135,000 international students who arrive in Australia next year will need private rental accommodation.
As education providers fight federal government plans to restrict immigration by cutting student visas, the new analysis links the post-pandemic surge in international students to steep rent rises in capital cities.
It’s not just the unis milking these foreigners as easy cash cows: landlords are making a motza as well. Wherever ‘international students’ are concentrated, rents have soared.
Median rents have soared 71 per cent in Sydney’s CBD since 2021, when Australia opened its borders after the pandemic […]
The department claims the number of international students enrolled in inner-Sydney universities and training colleges is equivalent to 42 per cent of the Sydney CBD population. However, many students enrolled to study in the central business district live in cheaper suburbs.
In Melbourne City – where foreign student enrolments are equal to 18 per cent of residents – rents have surged 67 per cent.
And in Brisbane’s CBD, where international student enrolments are the equivalent of one in eight city residents, rents rose 56 per cent between 2021 and 2024.
Remind me again just how we ‘need’ mass migration?
