Australian student visas harder to get

Scrutiny on international student visas was tightened with Ministerial Direction 115. The Minister has signed off on 7 November, and it came into effect on 14 November 2025 which superseded Ministerial Direction 111.

The new Direction 115 introduced changes to the priority categories 1 to 3. The new classification shifted India from Evidence Level 2 to Evidence Level 3 under the new Simplified Student Visa framework. Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan were already in that group. In effect there will be tighter checks during the visa process, more documents required for a successful outcome and greater number of applications going through a higher level of verifications.

The changes are further step taken by the Australian government to avoid ‘course hopping’ where students come in on a student visa drop out and move onto bridging visas while applying for a range of other courses. According to reports between 2023 and 2025 the number of students on bridging visas went from roughly 13,000 to more than 107,000. Some of these numbers reflect the long-term impact of the pandemic which prevented students from attending and engaging with their courses. Some are linked to the significant delays in processing of the visas and of the students caught up at the Administrative Review Tribunal with 48,826 student visa refusals still pending for a review.

An interesting concern was raised that 16 of Australia’s universities having campuses outside of their actual locale, for example a university in Queensland with a storefront in Sydney, this makes it easier for students to ‘course hop’ without actually visiting the ‘real’ campus they enrolled in. Student fees also impact the situation as international students at a major university such as Melbourne University. International students pay much higher fees for the highest ranked metro based universities than for enrolment at regional universities and so it is not as costly to drop out and move to a metro campus of a regional university. This trend is shown in the data about the dropout rates., e.g. dropout rates are under 10 percent for universities campuses in metro areas and in some regional university campuses there is almost 60% drop out rate. 

For those students who genuinely want to study in Australia and need a student visa, the tightening of these rules will add extra burdens. Each visa application will require a deeper understanding of the most recent changes of the visa system to ensure that the visa is likely granted. There have been significant changes to the legislation associated with education agencies to protect the international students consumers, such as mandatory reporting of commission received from education providers.

In this climate, therefore, it is even more imperative to engage a migration lawyer so that all the relevant bases are covered in the best possible way.

Photo by Andy Wang on Unsplash