Scapegoating or Restoring ‘Social License’?: Australia’s International Education Illiberal Policy Turn

This paper examines the politics of a sudden illiberal policy turn towards the recruitment of international students by Australian higher education institutions in 2024, within the broader context of similar policy developments in Canada and beyond. In 2024 the Albanese Labor government, under political pressure over a surge in the headline number of net migrants following the ending of pandemic border closure measures, and rising housing costs and shortages, sought to restrain universities’ international recruitment. An explicit rationale was the need for the sector to regain its ‘social license’; lending weight to critiques that universities had lost sight of their core educational mission, had become too entrepreneurial, and were socialising perceived costs of an influx of international students. Since the late 1980s Australian higher education policy towards international students has been notable for its shift ‘from aid to trade’, leading to a university sector heavily dependent upon revenues from international student fees, which have cross-subsided both the overall expansion of domestic students’ participation and research. Universities, faced with declining public funding on a per-student basis, and free to expand enrolments at any price that international student demand would permit, developed strong organisational capabilities for marketing and recruitment, evolved into more corporatised managerial organisations, and became strategically reliant upon foreign student income. The university sector invested heavily too in organisational capacity for articulating public policy preferences, although growing dependence on international student recruitment represented a general sectoral failure to secure more public funding. In 2024 higher education peak bodies strenuously resisted, ineffectively, government plans to cap each institution’s international enrolment with visa quotas, and to move away from the three-decade governance model of market-conforming university autonomy in international education. The paper explores the contradictions in the populist policy response to contention over immigration and housing issues via the higher education policy domain, and why the universities - a leading export sector - have been revealed again to have very limited political clout despite their social and economic salience.