Australian Government’s Draft International Education Framework to Cost Jobs
Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia (ITECA) Media Release
The most significant outcome of the draft International Education and Skills Strategic Framework released by the Australian Government will be job losses across the international education sector. That’s the assessment of the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia (ITECA), the peak body representing independent skills training, higher education, and international education providers.
Although there are some positive approaches regarding quality that ITECA members supports, the draft framework sets out a policy direction driven by short-term populism over concerns about overseas migration and tenuous links between the cost of housing in urban centres.
Over the past decade, international education in Australia has traditionally been a key contributor to the nation’s economic and social prosperity, facilitating substantial community benefits, strengthening global relationships, and aligning educational outcomes with the nation’s skill needs. However, the Australian Government’s new strategic framework suggests a drastic shift through increased regulation and oversight, which ITECA members argue is excessive.
The Australian Government’s strategy includes tightening regulations on student visas, such as raising English language and financial requirements, and granting the Immigration Minister increased powers to curb recruitment. Here, ITECA members argue that the Australian Government is erroneously targeting international education providers, whereas it would have been better to have improved administration of the migration system.
ITECA members have problems with the government’s command-and-control approach to international education set out in the draft framework. It seeks to tell independent tertiary education institutions what they should and shouldn’t offer international students. For international students, the Australian Government’s approach is even more profound as it suggests that the government tell students what they will study and where.
On balance, ITECA members believe the framework is a collection of ordinary policy options lumped together with a series of bad ones. It reflects a chaotic approach to international education, where there is little relationship between tertiary education reform, the migration strategy, and a non-existent population strategy. The Australian Government’s failure to set out a vision for population growth means it cannot articulate the number of international students in Australia and what relationship, if any, those students have to Australia’s future workforce needs.
The advice from ITECA members is clear. The Australian Government’s proposed strategy will cost jobs across more than one thousand international skills training and higher education providers committed to providing quality student outcomes.
ITECA will work with the Australian Government to seek amendments to the strategy so that it puts students at the heart of an international education system where quality is underpinned by a framework that clearly sets out the relationship between international education to economic growth and a much-needed, but currently non-existent, population strategy.
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Andrew Smith
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leefe
Return to home pageSomething is better than nothing, while the sector at large complains in private or on LinkedIn threads about regulatory etc. threats, and now threatened ‘caps’, wall of silence in public (maybe too used to Go8 VCs doing their bidding in private?), then mainstream media and commentary have been making unfounded claims and dog whistling around international education, immigration and population; what else is news?
In Australia, especially RW white media, we not only seem singularly incapable of saying anything positive about immigration, higher education, indigenous and progress, but very quick cry victim and blame somebody…..who cannot protect themselves
In international education, withstanding other factors eg. our hands off and administrative approach to quality, the source of issues has been the long standing UK/US ‘population control’ movement influenced by Malthus, Galton, Madison Grant, 1920-40s US/Germany, fossil fueled ZPG Zero Population Growth, white Australia policy and Tanton Network tentacles (linked to SPA, MW Oz, TAPRI etc. informs RW MSM locally and shares donors in US with Koch Network = IPA, CIS ec. locally).
Classic tactics of a long game strategy i.e. ABS/UNPD NOM net OS border movement formula (used UK, Oz & NZ) was quietly expanded in 2006 to capture more international students via the 12/16+ month rule (previous 12/12) which is prone e.g. post Covid catch ups, to spike and create data noise in the short term but misses long term decline in permanent population; understood by no one (ditto UK where it’s leveraged by RW MSM, Tories & UKIP too), and NOM had been deliberately mislabelled as ‘immigration’ (suggesting permanence).
Further, using techniques of climate science denial*, low info electorate, low data and finance literacy a whole series of seemingly logical links are made in media, but actually misrepresent the situation, for a good dog whistle.
Use headline proxy NOM, immigration and population data to claim correlation with issues e.g. housing; quickly debunked when Sydney’s median house prices have been stagnant in past decade…. does not suggest high demand?
Further, those in media using data to make such claims ignore Stats101 and ABS advice i.e. they never or cannot provide supply data on student housing/supply types while NOM is a proxy, not designed for such analysis? ABS advice is:
’23 Estimates of NOM based on the previous methods and those based on the ‘12/16 month rule’ methodology are not comparable. The key change is the introduction of the ‘12/16 month rule’ for measuring a person’s residency in Australia, replacing the previous ‘12/12 month rule’.’
https://www.quixoticquant.com/post/the-missing-million/
Tanton Network not only promotes white Christian nationalism (a friend is mates with Abbott’s boss at Danube Inst, in Budapest & was also, unknown to most, working at Fox News) informing the alt right, Trump/GOP, RW media etc. but uses classic climate science denial techniques of Koch Network on data; his publishing outfit TSCP described by SPLC as:
‘routinely publishes race-baiting articles penned by white nationalists. The press is a program of U.S. Inc, the foundation created by John Tanton, the racist founder and principal ideologue of the modern nativist movement. TSCP puts an academic veneer of legitimacy over what are essentially racist arguments about the inferiority of today’s immigrants.’
*See locally focus on short term temporary immigrant, i.e. students’ data noise (focus on weather) while ignoring long term trends mother lode of demographic transition in permanent populations 7+ million oldies/boomers, starting now (ignore long term climate); ‘the great replacement’ including fossil fuels by renewables, IC by EVs, white people by brown, Christians by secularists, men by women etc.
Australian RW media, commentary, politics, culture and parts of the economy have been wedged in the 1950s by this movement for political traction and retro social Darwinism for the <1%.
So, special-interest private sector group affected by proposed changes object to those changes. I’m shocked, I tell you. Utterly gobsmacked, astounded, amazed, flabberghasted, startled, stunned, surprised … reaches for thesaurus …