This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
INTERNATIONAL student enrolments will be capped at 270,000 in 2025 by the Albanese government, meeting mixed reactions from impacted industries.
The government will set a National Planning Level (NPL) for new international student commencements for calendar year 2025, to be divided across higher education and vocational education and training (VET) sectors and across capital city and regional institutions.
“For some, it will be less. For some, it will be more. The big winners are regional universities. It’s designed to make sure we set up the system in a better and fairer way, in a more sustainable way,” said Jason Clare, education minister.
The 270,000 cap will see the number of new international student commencements brought back to pre-pandemic levels.
Publicly funded universities will be allocated 145,000 new international student commencements in 2025, a number around 2023 levels. With Individual limits will be outlined in an International Student Profile (ISP).
New VET international student commencements in 2025 will be capped at around 95,000, with providers with a higher ratio of international students to be given a lower allocation to encourage them to diversify their student base.
Most impacted will be other universities and for non-university higher education providers who will see new international student commencements in 2025 at around 30,000, down by around 20% on 2023 levels.
The Property Council of Australia’s Student Accommodation Council has welcomed the cap, as a “sustainable number”, unsurprisingly due to the government’s renewed focus on growing PBSA supply.
“Minister Clare has recognised that to grow the amount of student accommodation in Australia we need to see the higher education sector partner with the private sector to increase supply,” said Torie Brown executive director of the Student Accommodation Council.
“The Australian Government’s ambition to build more PBSA will only work if its state colleagues work with the sector to turbo-charge supply. The quickest way to do this by 2026 is to ensure students are taking up existing beds and incentivise further accommodation development.”
Instead the council has called out higher taxes on international investors in the PBSA market in both Victoria and Queensland.
“Investors have capital ready to deploy into developing new assets, but they have been waiting to see the size of the government’s student caps,” added Brown.
“The PBSA sector is reliant on a strong, sustainable pipeline of international students to underpin the viability of future projects. International students make up 74 per cent of our residents.”
The current pipeline of new PBSA developments will not meet future demand, with the projected 7,770 new beds due to come online by 2026, according to a report from the council.
At the same time, Universities Australia has called the limit “a handbrake to Australia’s second biggest export industry”, the $48 billion international education sector.
“Every dollar from overseas students is reinvested back into Australia’s universities. Having fewer students here will only widen the funding gap at a time universities need greater support. There will also be significant flow-on effects for other sectors of the economy that rely heavily on international students,” said David Lloyd, chair at Universities Australia.
“Under Ministerial Direction 107, visa grants in higher education are down 23% on last year, causing a $4.3 billion hit to the economy and putting 14,000 jobs in our sector at risk.”
“We’ll be working closely with our members on the details of what’s been announced today and the impact on their individual institutions as we push for the certainty, stability and growth our sector and the nation needs to secure a productive and prosperous future.”
The acquisition builds on the joint venture Brookfield and Citiplan formed in December 2021 when the purchased a PBSA development site across from the University of Melbourne.