SUPRA’s submission to the senate inquiry into the provisions of the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024
SUPRA recently made a submission to the senate inquiry into the provisions of the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024. The bill proposed changes to the Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000 around the activities of agents, and increases in ministerial powers to cap overall international student numbers, and to cap international student enrolment numbers at the course and unit level for individual universities.
While we supported some of the proposed changes, including higher education providers being required to provide information to the Department of Education about how much they are paying agents, we were strongly opposed to a number of other proposals.
In our submission we:
- Recommended that students have increased access to agent information, including being told that agents are paid by providers; a means to check the validity of agents; and a means to complain about poor agent conduct
- Argued against an increase in ministerial powers that would allow the Education Minister to cap overall international student numbers, and to cap enrolments at the provider or course level. We feel that this is government overreach and marks a significant shift away from universities as being independent from government, and we do not believe that this is in international or domestic students’ best interests.
- Argued that research does not support that international students are the primary driver of the housing crisis, and that the government should be addressing the high levels of international students’ unsafe and unaffordable accommodation.
- We argued that students and student representative organisations across Australia needed to be included in further consultation around the proposed changes, to ensure students are at the centre of higher education in Australia.
Overall, SUPRA believes that the government’s approach to higher education should centre students, student experience, and education as a life changing pursuit, and should see education as a means to shape Australia’s migration practices, and we do not believe that many of the proposed changes do this.
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