UK to charge universities $1,200 per international student
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The government handed universities free reign to hand out as many visa as they liked, and they handed out millions.
And the unspoken deal is that you're not buying an education, you're buying residency in Australia because a large percentage of these students never go home again.
And the government has staunchly - ridiculously - stated for years that international students do not impact housing. Yeah right - they don't live anywhere.
It's just a vast population growth program under the guise of international education with immigrants required to pay their $50K to universities for the nod and a wink right to live here.
Australia, which already had a housing crisis, now has a housing nuclear inferno.
Absolutely out of control population growth. The governments do it because more people equals "growing economy" - the only thing they care about.
And they don't invest in the infrastructure to support the millions of people added to the population so the quality of life goes down for everyone, there's budget cuts in government services, the inequality gap widens.
Growth - through population growth, through "international students" - governments absolutely love it because it hides their bad economic management, and the rich people declare how wonderful massive population growth is because those rich people own at least 3 houses.
The entire game is rigged for rich people to get rich and everyone else to shove over and make room because there's a lot more people coming.
Removing them won't improve things as much as you might think.
The housing crisis is a supply and demand problem so they've got to increase housing supply.
The problem there is these is a shortage of construction workers. So the workforce simply isn't there to build more houses. Current construction workforce is 110% maxxed out.
I reckon they should be handing out visas to qualified construction workers left and right to solve that problem, then get the homes built. Dubai and Singapore do this and have no such shortage of construction workers. I can't see why we can't do the same.
Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.
Damn right, it's big business for Australia; International education earned Australia $55 billion in 2025 from some ~ 844,000 students that year.
( ~ 850K students has been peak international student population per annum in Australia, its never exceeded a million )
These are temporary education visa's that may in a few cases lead to insecure work visa's in Australia and while some international students may get citizenship after 10 years of expensive and insecure stay in Australia .. the total number of permanent migrants accepted each year is (currently) capped at a modest 185,000 per annum (across the board, not just limited to former international students).
It will. Because guess what, these students are working jobs (mostly in hospitality) no one else wants to work. Businesses no longer able to find staff.
I agree. The solution isn't cutting overseas students. The solution is to build more houses. To build more houses get more construction workers (who can coincidentally also build houses for themselves).
I think in most of the west construction jobs are so incredibly protected and regulated, they just can’t seem to build anything anymore.
And now the government is creating "activity zones" around every train line where they will pack in super high density housing to pack more and more people in. Communities - the people who live in these "activity zones" hate it.
And new suburbs springing up many kilometers outside the cities - ugly wastelands without trees, without trains, without community. All to stuff in more people because more people is more money.
Why? Why do we want more people? Who voted for it? No-one because no government ever took it to the people because they all do it.
We should be allowed to protest against population growth without being called racists.
Population growth impacts community, environment, social services, quality of life.
Australia has massive droughts in which every drop of water counts but we've forgotten that because there's no drought right now.
>> Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.
I'm sorry I simply do not buy these old "accepted wisdoms" that get rolled out.
Just like the mining industry who try to convince us that without mining Australia's eocnomy would be ruined.
That's always the bottom line - "without this <thing that you want but I don't> then the economy will be ruined" I don't believe it.
Australia (and especially Sydney) needs to build more houses!
Which are circumstances that they should care about. Unfortunately many are also prone to falling for dog whistles about international students which aren't the root cause of their problems and distract from getting deep into the weeds about real issues with Australian housing.
Why? It's a currently popular argument on Twitter? If productivity keeps increasing the way it has been there will be about 700% too many people in 50 years.
Also most of these people that don't care now will be dead in 50 years. So why should they care?
1) land hoarded by the feudal aristocracy (parasites descended from thugs), who do not pay property taxes because there are effectively none (wouldn't want Chuck von Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg und Gotha to pay taxes, now, would we?). Most people in the UK do not own the land under their lodging due to the feudal practice of leasehold, and have to pay rent on it and are constrained from doing even essential maintenance like fire safety without the permission of the freeholder.
2) NIMBYs, generally older and Tory, who vote to block construction and are pandered to by pretty much every major party
Granted, England has twice the population density of Japan, but Tokyo somehow manages to have affordable housing.
The UK has a lower population density, and Britain (roughly the same size) a much lower density than Honshu - and England is about the same as Honshu.
> land hoarded by the feudal aristocracy (parasites descended from thugs), who do not pay property taxes because there are effectively none
Also other rich people.
> Most people in the UK do not own the land under their lodging due to the feudal practice of leasehold
Not most. its 19% of dwellings, and as they tend to be smaller households a smaller proportion of people live in them https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/leasehold-dwellings...
> NIMBYs, generally older and Tory
Mostly Tory? The affluent mostly vote Labour now.
They are setting immigration allowances with respect to growth and financial planning.
Municipalities generally over the last 50 years decided they like their neighborhoods how they are, thank you very much.
Local governments needed to be building for this all along. Now we play catch-up.
Though, also, immigrant students are very desirable due to how much they general pay for school (and this subsidize the rest of the budget), and how little any municipal, state, or federal governments had to pay to produce a productive adult taxpayer.
2. Build more _affordable_ housing stock.
Doesn't seem like that hard.
Because that is what would happen.
If that is so, why is Australia's housing problem Australia wide and not isolated to high student population locations?
Australia's problem with housing is Australia hasn't/doesn't treat housing as housing, they have treated it as a tax efficient investment vehicle with negative gearing.
Giving you Spain as an example, that I am more familiar with: We've had an insane housing crisis for the last decade, and yet we have about 4 million empty houses across the country.
The housing crisis has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with an unregulated basic good. Having a roof over your head, should be a basic right, and no-one should be allowed to speculate and make crazy money out of your need for it.
The prices rise because there is no regulation at all and it is one of most lucrative forms of investment, with a lot less risk than other forms of financial investment.
The vast majority of people in the UK, for example, have long commutes by train. I have workmates that have 2.5 hours of commute each way, and while that is extreme, 45m to an hour is completely normal.
Translate that to Spain and your radius for an available house is immense.
There are 266 municipalities around Valencia, each municipality with several (some dozens) of towns, that you can reach by car in less than 60 minutes. In Madrid, there are 179 municipalities less than 60m away from the city.
Again, it would be fantastic if you could walk to work. But that is a massive privilege in large cities.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the social organisation of Italy won't be massively different, i.e, lots of small towns around a major city.
I still stand by my point. The housing crisis has nothing to do with immigration, and everything to do with rich people and corporations being allowed to speculate with a basic good.
Paraphrasing Gary Stevenson, if you allow wealth accumulation past a certain level where the wealth cannot be spent in normal things, the uberrich will start buying ALL the space. And that is exactly what we are living now.
Also I worry some people in these discussions might be speaking out of a worry about preventing racism which distorts discussion of the issue at hand - the effect students have on housing prices
It seems housing has become a global asset class, and that squeezes out local purchasers.
The usual argument is that more housing would solve this problem, which is like saying less carbon would solve global warming.
I bet these foreign students are not profiting from your housing crisis, they're probably victims too. You should look further up, follow the money.
> The government handed universities free reign to hand out as many visa as they liked, and they handed out millions.
The government defines the terms for and issues student visas, not universities. Students have to apply for a visa themselves and there are distinct substantive requirements for being granted one, including having a study place, being a genuine student, having sufficient financial resources to support yourself etc. The government (through DIBP), not the universities, make the final call on whether a student visa is granted. Many visa applications are rejected. See Section 3 of https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-stats/files/stud... , which was in 2023 before the recent migration policy tightenings, where the outside-Australian grant rate for eg India is less than 70%.
> And the unspoken deal is that you're not buying an education, you're buying residency in Australia because a large percentage of these students never go home again.
As other commenters have pointed out, there is a cap on permanent residency visas issued for reasons other than family reunification and that cap is substantially lower than the number of temporary visas issued. Any international student graduate would need to compete for a permanent residency visa by way of obtaining enough points for an invitation to apply through one of the permanent residency streams. These typically require a high level of education, local work experience, stable and permanent income amongst other things. The current estimates are that around 40% of international students obtain permanent residency within 10 years of graduation, so the majority of international student graduates either leave Australia or "hop" between temporary visas (which the government has for some time put mechanisms in place to prevent).
> Absolutely out of control population growth.
12 month rolling average of population growth has been steady at around 1.5% for the past 10 years, with the brief exceptions of the COVID period where it was negative and 2023, where it was 2.5% , largely due to the fact that many people who had delayed migration plans during the COVID years now actually acted on them and short term population growth rates due to migration around the world were also at high levels. Those levels have now largely mean reverted, partly due to policy, partly due to there no longer being a backlog of demand and partly due to economic circumstances which have reduced the incentive to migrate.
> Growth - through population growth, through "international students" - governments absolutely love it because it hides their bad economic management,
There is no evidence to suggest that population growth is an intended policy to "hide" bad economic management. Increasing immigration was the only responsible thing to do in 2022 and 2023 because the number of working age adults had shrunk and the excess of demand during those years after effectively zero or negative interest rates meant that there was a need to fill that demand with new workforce. Part of that comes from persons who start out studying and move into employment.
> And the government has staunchly - ridiculously - stated for years that international students do not impact housing. Yeah right - they don't live anywhere.
International students are barely competing for the same housing stock as long-term residents or citizens. International students typically live in rental shared accommodation, not in the detached homes for sale that your average Australian would be aiming for. Of course, international students have to live somewhere your comments overstates the impact that this actually has on the housing market.
> And they don't invest in the infrastructure to support the millions of people added to the population
Governments are investing in "the infrastructure". Billions are spent on further developing public transportation systems, roads etc according to established city plans.
> The entire game is rigged for rich people to get rich and everyone else to shove over and make room because there's a lot more people coming.
On the contrary to "more people coming" - Immigration has slowed down significantly in almost every developed country. In future years, it is likely that Australia will struggle to meet its targets for economic based immigration because the age cohorts in the sending countries are getting proportionately smaller and there is also less demand to migrate in general.
Im certainly a bit biased as I work in higher education, but I also see first hand the sorry state of affairs successive governments have left their golden "world leading universities" in.
Education has always been an investment. Tax puts money in education, the country gains in reduced poverty, increased safety, better mental health, etc.
To think about education as a way to earn money was absurd from the beginning. But when billionaires run a country is what you get. Margaret Thatcher started a trend to lie to the public and brainwash them on thinking that public investment is waste. The country is harvesting the lies that she planted. And children and teenagers will get the worse part of it. Sadly, many people still believe in the lies of conservatives and change is difficult when so many people has magical thinking (stop investing, cut taxes, and somehow money will rain from the sky).
Prior to that, neoliberal think tanks have been working for almost decades to prepare the dismantling of the public institutions.
The UK enjoys the worst of both worlds: the high taxes of Europe combined with the low benefits of the US like no free higher education (Germany provides free university education even for foreigners, for instance).
We have some quite substantial benefits, such as mostly free healthcare.
University tuition fees are heavily subsidised for British students, especially at better universities or expensive to provide subjects. Fees at leading universities are much lower than in the US ( https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/hig... ) - although US universities have more fee waivers for students from lower income families etc. AFAIK it is private money funding that, not public.
Student loans are once again heavily subsidised - the interest rate is inflation.
Not all British universities are world class. The expansion of higher education has increased the number of lower quality universities and courses. In Scotland there are no fees, but a lower proportion of school leavers go to university. The rest of the UK should do at least the same - IMO shut down whole institutions and courses.
Fwiw, Germany is also taking a big chunk ontop.
If you add taxes taken from your wage and VAT, forced social security payments etc all up, you'll end with a rough taxation of ~50% in UK. Of you do the same in Germany you end up over 60%, often nearing 70% unless you're a single income household with kids (they lower the tax burden a lot through deductions. Obviously still expensive, but your social contributions go down a lot.)
(That pay would effectively be almost 10x what the average person in the US makes a year.)
That’s without oasdi, Medicare, state taxes, city taxes, and insurance.
44% though was high, you’re right about that, because some of that tax was paid up front off of bonuses and will reduce over the course of the year.
I’ll probably end up around 35% without counting retirement and of course without counting all the other nickle and diming taxes that are paid post tax
Ofc not counting social security, medicare, and that state tax that is around half as much as what you are paying federally (which is more than double many other localities).
So you were saying as a combination kind of effective tax rate, got it.
When you first said that 44% number, it was very fishy - because there is a federal cap at 37% :)
I'm in a dual income high earner family, and my rate is lower than that (35%). I live in a high income tax state. I included medical + dental + vision, but NOT life/accident insurance, flex accounts etc.
Are you sure you're not counting SPP contributions? And are you deducting the tax refund you get every year (which eventually takes into account all the deductions, etc you get)?
My net pay is only 41% (i.e. 59% is taken out) - but that's due to 401K, ESPP and other voluntary insurances I pay for.
Taxes in the UK are quite low by European standards. The UK's tax revenue to GDP ratio is similar to Canada's (either a bit lower or a bit higher, depending on year/source).
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-i... (page 8)
I couldn't afford full time tuition in the early 2000s, in spite of working a half time job while at uni.
Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" describes a world in which the academy is entirely sheltered from the real world and develops a culture of dependence, detachment and indifference. Do we want that world?
If we throw money at universities to keep doing what they've always done, we'll create institutions that exist only for their own sake and without any real purpose or value outside of a hedonistic pursuit of knowledge.
We should fund universities to serve the people, like the free university places in Scotland. We should fund research and innovation. We should fund the moral and cultural development of citizens and those invested in the future of the country.
But we should be careful we don't accidentally create a system that can't survive in a competitive and changing world.
I saw many courses in Clearing listed as being only for foreign students.
A consequence of the government's attempt to make universities 'self-fund' the discount for local students.
> The income has also covered up a lot of the defunding of education by the government
Well yeah, that was the point. The solution would probably involve increasing the university's income from the government, though, not decreasing it.
> We have also seen a series of problems involving misuse and exploitation of student visas, where visas are used as an entry point for living and working in the UK without any intention to complete the course, and increasing numbers of asylum claims from students at the end of their course, even though nothing substantive has changed in their home country while they have been in the UK.
> In 2021, international students at UK universities generated an estimated £20.65 billion in exports through living expenditure and tuition fees, but it is right that these benefits are shared.[footnote 48] The Government will explore introducing a levy on higher education provider income from international students, to be reinvested into the higher education and skills system. Further details will be set out in the Autumn Budget.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/restoring-control...
Unfortunately, it's also one of the easiest types to fiddle with when people start screaming about immigrants / the evils of student housing / etc - prospective overseas students don't have nearly as many people willing to speak up for them as people with employment offers or who have family members already in the UK.
Hence this scheme intended to reduce the supply of places, the 'visa brake' under Starmer, and all the wild variations in policy under the previous Tory governments. We've not really been able to find any sort of happy medium since Brexit, and in the meantime - as you rightly point out in some of your other comments - it's the universities that are being harmed.
One of the problems is that a lot of people do not realise just how much money overseas students pay and the extent to which they subsidise home students.
It already is! The current system mandates that universities provide a whole range of degrees to British students below cost. One of the few ways they have to do that is charging high fees to international students. If they don't want this happening they could a) increase the cap on tuition fees or b) fund the gap themselves. Taxing the income that makes this subsidy work is just going to make things work as either the system moves closer to collapse or universities become even less discriminate in accepting international students.
(Though, also, some of those degrees are a lot cheaper than others despite featuring the same tuition cap. If you go to university to study most humanities or mathematics, then you're also subsidizing the engineering, science, and especially medical degrees)
Teaching cheaper subjects at Oxbridge and other universities with a tutorial system is a lot more expensive than doing the same at a degree mill.
My daughter is doing a middle cost subject (archaeology and anthropology) at Oxford and I think £10k/year fees are great value for the degree.
That applies in any country, for any society, any culture. It is effectively your own parents betraying you to advantage, advance, and favor the children of others. It is such a deep betrayal, overt treason! A healthy society would punish this kind of craven betrayal in the most extreme way.