Month: May 2021

International students and permanent residence

Andrew Norton4 Comments

A Grattan Institute report released last night calls for big changes to the criteria for gaining permanent residence. While recognising that migration and higher education links may have benefits for Australia, the report questions giving permanent migration preference to former international students through points for Australian and regional university degrees, the professional year, and use of skills shortage lists. Instead they recommend permanent residence priority for employer-sponsored people earning more than $80,000 a year.

Major changes to PR rules would make international students nervous. And whatever the general merits of Grattan’s proposal, after Job-ready Graduates and border closures now probably isn’t the time to inflict another big problem on the higher education sector.

But reading the Grattan report (which I saw in draft) highlighted to me that I did not know how many former international students eventually achieve PR. The work for this post was an only partially successful attempt to remedy this situation. I’m not a migration expert and I may have missed or misunderstood things, but FWIW my key findings are below.

Total numbers of former international students with permanent residence

Counting former international students with PR is not a straightforward exercise, since there are many direct and indirect routes to permanent residence. A 2018 Treasury paper based on detailed immigration data identified 5,500 routes from a temporary visa, of which student visas are the largest category, to a permanent visa.

Taking all of these routes into account, of the 1.6 million people who had arrived on a student visa between 2000-01 and 2013-14 the Treasury paper calculated that 16 per cent, or about a quarter of a million, had achieved PR.

This number, however, is not consistent with an earlier Productivity Commission analysis, which on my reading of the relevant chart gets us to 300,000 international student conversions to PR just counting arrivals between 2000-01 and 2005-06.

The ABS Characteristics of Recent Migrants survey estimates how many people who first arrived on a student visa in the last 10 years have achieved PR or citizenship (a further step on from PR). The 2013 and 2016 surveys show growing numbers of former international students with PR or citizenship. By 2019, however, the numbers had fallen back below the 2013 level.

All the ABS numbers in the chart are below what we might expect from the Treasury or Productivity Commission figures. Policy changes a decade ago made it harder to transition from a student visa to PR just by holding a qualification in an area of alleged skills shortage. So an underlying downward trend is quite possible. There are, however, important differences between the ABS numbers and earlier statistics.

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Can performance penalties reduce university maximum basic grant amounts?

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The current university funding agreements change the nature of performance funding. Previously performance funding was configured as a reward scheme, providing additional funds in exchange for meeting performance-related criteria. Now it is a penalty scheme, deducting money from teaching grants if universities don’t meet performance criteria. The performance benchmarks are assumed to align with the pre-Job-ready Graduates performance funding policy, but this has not been publicly confirmed.

This post explores whether a performance deduction from teaching grants is legally permissible under the Higher Education Support Act 2003. It is clearly not the kind of performance incentive envisaged by HESA 2003, and there are grounds for thinking that a court might find that it is partially or entirely invalid.

The maximum basic grant amount and the performance penalty

The most important grant provision in HESA 2003 is the maximum basic grant amount (MBGA) for higher education courses. This establishes the maximum amount the government will pay from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme (CGS) for Commonwealth supported student places in coursework courses, other than demand driven enrolments for regional and remote bachelor-degree Indigenous students and medical courses. The total value of this grant for 2021 is about $6.8 billion.

Under HESA 2003 each university is to be paid the lesser of the higher education courses MBGA, as set out in their funding agreement, or the total Commonwealth contribution value (relevant discipline funding rates * full-time equivalent students) of student places delivered. Any enrolments above the cap are funded at the student contribution rate only.

The funding agreements include total MBGA amounts for the next three years. The example below is from Macquarie University’s funding agreement, but all agreements have the same or similar formats.

Another clause in the funding agreements, however, purports to take away an element of the MBGA in the event of poor performance. The example below is again Macquarie but all other other agreements have the same format.
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The Budget and higher education

Andrew Norton6 Comments

The Commonwealth Budget has triggered confusion about higher education funding. How much does the government spend? Has there been a cut or not?

The Budget documents understate government higher education expenditure

The only summary statement of higher education expenditure in the Budget documents is in Budget Paper No. 1, which reports spending on the higher education ‘sub-function’ (sub- of education generally).

But what is in the higher education sub-function? I’ve collated as much information as I can from the Budget papers and I think it means grants administered under the Higher Education Support Act 2003. I can’t exactly replicate it but my numbers are very close – slightly less in every year. I lack expenditure on the Indigenous Student Success Program, which HESA 2003 funds but PM&C rather than DESE administers.

The ‘higher education sub-function’ significantly understates Commonwealth assistance for higher education. As the top line in grey in the chart below shows, using numbers from Budget Statement No. 4 on agency resourcing, it doesn’t even cover money flowing under HESA 2003 itself. The difference is money lent through the HELP loan scheme. Although the Budget papers don’t specifically quantify HELP lending this is likely to become the single largest source of funding for higher education, as international student revenues collapse and the Commonwealth Grant Scheme stagnates.

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