At The PIE Live Asia Pacific on the Gold Coast, the conversation was dominated by the issues that have consumed Australia’s international education sector for much of the past three years: provider allocations, visa refusals, migration settings, transnational education and whether government rhetoric still matches the reality on the ground.
But the prevailing mood, fairly or not, was that international education is being managed tactically rather than strategically – strong statements about quality and stability, alongside settings that change faster than institutional recruitment cycles.
Amid all of this, Assistant Minister for International Education Julian Hill referred to the government’s forthcoming International Education and Skills Strategic Framework. It was easy to overlook.
It was not a launch. The draft framework was formally released in May 2024 by the ministers then responsible for education, skills and home affairs. Hill’s reference instead resurfaced a longer-term piece of work that has remained unfinished while the policy environment has repeatedly changed around it.
For a framework intended to provide long-term direction, it has already spent more than two years being overtaken by short-term policy. That makes its completion more important, not less.
The draft proposed three broad directions: a sector built on quality and integrity; a managed system intended to deliver sustainable growth; and taking Australian education and training to the world. The difficult question – and the one which the completed framework must answer – is what takes priority when those objectives collide.
Australia has never lacked strategic ambition in international education. The challenge has rarely been writing strategies. It has been ensuring they remain relevant once the world changes around them.
Australia has been here before
Successive governments have periodically attempted to set a longer-term direction for international education. In 1992, then education minister Kim Beazley recognised it as both a national asset and a public responsibility, warning against viewing the sector too narrowly through a commercial lens. Further strategies followed in 2010 and 2016, each broadening the agenda towards student welfare, quality, innovation, diplomacy and trade.
The 2021–2030 strategy is the clearest case of a strategy overtaken by events. Written in the aftermath of COVID, it reflected understandable optimism about recovery, diversification and sustainable growth.
The government changed within months. As borders reopened, student numbers rebounded faster than many anticipated, and international education moved from post-pandemic recovery to the centre of a national argument about migration, housing, infrastructure and population growth.
The policy response followed: proposed caps, ministerial directions, provider-level allocations and rising refusal rates. The assumptions on which the strategy rested were overtaken far sooner than a ten-year horizon would suggest.
That does not mean strategies are pointless – only that they cannot depend on the future unfolding as expected. A modest first measure of success for the new framework may therefore be whether it remains relevant for longer than its predecessor: a low bar, but one which recent experience suggests is not assured.
Beyond the electoral cycle
Australia’s federal electoral cycle is three years. International education operates across much longer horizons: students and families make decisions that outlast the governments responsible for them; institutions invest in partnerships over many years; and relationships with source countries take years to build, months to damage and longer still to repair.
International education also sits across two portfolios of government: Education, concerned with quality, student outcomes and institutions; and Home Affairs, concerned with visa integrity, migration risk and population settings.
Both matter, but are not always aligned. In recent years migration objectives have increasingly been pursued through education levers – visa charges, processing priorities, refusal settings – making them international education policy in everything but name.
Hill’s parallel role – Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs, within the Home Affairs portfolio – gives him an unusual vantage point on that divide, even though student visa policy sits elsewhere. The institutional architecture is changing too: from 2027, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission will oversee international student allocations across universities and other higher education providers.
Australia does not currently appear to have an international education strategy so much as visa fees, visa decisions, processing priorities, NOSC allocations and ATEC. Taken together, they function as a de facto strategy – but one whose priorities have never been clearly stated. The new Strategic Framework should make them explicit.
Demand is not a tap
Government controls many of the levers shaping how Australia is perceived offshore: visa settings, charges, processing priorities, regulation and public messaging.
Ministerial Direction 107 showed how powerfully an administrative setting can redirect behaviour: students adjusted their choices towards institutions offering the clearest visa pathway, some later transferring lawfully once onshore. The policy did not eliminate demand for other providers – it merely changed the route through which students reached them, while creating new integrity and retention problems elsewhere.
Government can allocate capacity and influence processing priority. It cannot allocate student demand. Students and parents respond to cost, risk, reputation and word of mouth; once they redirect their attention, rebuilding confidence can take years. Demand is not a tap that can be turned off and later reopened at the same pressure.
Provider under-utilisation of NOSCs reflects the gap between capacity created in Canberra and decisions made in family homes, agency offices and classrooms around the world. An allocation can create permission to grow – it cannot create the students required to fill it.
There is no homogeneous “sector”
The phrase “the international education sector” is convenient, but it conceals substantial differences. Those within provider categories can be as significant as those between them. NUHEP, for example, is a regulatory category, not a single operating model. Providers within it differ substantially in ownership, purpose and scale, so policy applied uniformly across the category will not have uniform effects.
ELICOS shows why these distinctions matter: its students are international by definition and its courses comparatively short, so the effects of higher fees, refusals and deteriorating sentiment appear quickly – an early signal, given it feeds other parts of the system, of what may later affect vocational and higher education. It is the canary in the international education coal mine, yet remains peripheral to debates framed primarily around universities.
The same caution applies beyond onshore enrolment. The draft’s third objective, taking Australian education to the world, treats transnational education as central to a more diverse international presence – some of it built on student mobility, some of it not. A framework focused mainly on visas and onshore numbers would capture only part of that picture.
Quality is an outcome, not a category
If the Strategic Framework requires a highest-order priority, it should be education quality – assessed through student outcomes and relevance to employers and communities, not institutional category, reputation or regulatory status.
Provider diversity does not excuse misconduct – some providers pursued students too aggressively, giving government legitimate reasons to intervene – but treating an entire category as suspect because of its weakest participants is a poor substitute for effective enforcement. Australia’s regulators already have substantial legislated powers; they should be used against providers that fail students or breach their obligations.
The draft says integrity measures should be calibrated to target risk. The completed framework should hold itself to that standard. Regulation should act against the bad apple, not declare the whole orchard diseased.
Why Australia?
Above all, the framework should be understandable to the people being asked to place their trust in it. The draft repeatedly invokes the best interests of students – ethical recruitment, transparency, safety, support. The completed framework should make those commitments meaningful from the point a student first considers Australia.
Australia expects a prospective student, often sitting on the other side of the world, to build and defend an investment case. Why this course? Why this provider? How will it be funded? What value will it deliver when they return home?
Those are reasonable questions – but they must be answered while weighing tuition, living costs, uncertain visa outcomes and settings that may change mid-course. The non-refundable visa application charge alone is AUD $2,500; medical exams, biometrics and professional assistance can push it higher.
There is an ethical dimension here. Applying for a student visa should never feel like buying a lottery ticket when a family must stake that much simply to have it considered. Visa integrity requires individual assessment, and no applicant can be promised an outcome – but a fair system should not require families to stake thousands of dollars on rules they can read but outcomes they cannot anticipate.
The decision reaches far beyond a commercial calculation. For many families, it means entrusting a child to a country thousands of kilometres from home – separation, unfamiliar cultures, anxiety about safety and belonging. It is a decision about who their child may become, as much as what qualification they receive. The financial commitment may be among the largest the family ever makes, while the personal commitment is harder to quantify. Both deserve clarity in return.
A family should be able to understand what Australia is trying to achieve; whether it genuinely wants students from their market; and how migration and population objectives may affect them – enough to decide whether this is a country to which they are prepared to entrust several formative years of their child’s life.
Ultimately, the framework should allow a student and their parents to answer one question with confidence: why Australia?
A framework understood only by policy specialists cannot answer that question – it would add another layer of official language while leaving those bearing the risk no clearer about the country asking for their trust.
In 1992, Beazley warned that Australia’s approach was too narrowly commercial and paid too little attention to student needs. More than three decades later, Australia asks every prospective student and family to make a compelling financial, educational and personal case for choosing us.
The completed Strategic Framework should tell them, in terms they can understand, what Australia offers, what it expects and which objectives will take priority when they conflict.
Before asking families to make and defend their case for Australia, Australia should be prepared to make and defend its case to them.
