The ups and downs in the student visa program continue

Over the past 12 months more than 15,000 international students withdrew their Australian student visa applications. This represents about 3.6 percent of the total student visa applications were withdrawn. Normally in a 12-month period there are a maximum of about 6000 student visa applications being withdrawn. More withdrawals were in the vocational education area at 6.1 percent with just 2.8 percent in the higher education sphere.

It is speculated that the reason for the withdrawals is the high processing times with the majority of the student visa applications being processed in about eight months, which are almost at 100 days for higher education and around 170 days for vocational education.

Despite the large number of withdrawals, a record number of international students came into Australia during February – according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 201,490 foreign students entered, this is 15 percent higher than in 2024. This brings the total to about 700,000 international students in Australia at present.

This number does not include those on bridging visas or those with cases pending in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

The government has put in place tougher migration requirements including English language skills and higher visa application fees and this may also have a bearing on the withdrawals.

One of the student visa program integrity measures implemented recently has been greater number of cancelations of student visas for students who do not hold a valid COE. In some cases student visas have been cancelled while the international students are outside Australia. Others have been cancelled on arrival when the international students withouth active and valid COE are interviewed, and some are refused entry, detained and removed from Australia.

Despite the strengthened measures implemented, Australia remains one of the top international study destinations along with the US, UK and Canada. The number of international students coming to Australia predicted to continue growing over the following months.

With the recent change in the US administration, there have been hints that the Trump government is looking at closing its doors to prospective Chinese students wanting to study there, with one of the reasons given was that students may be spying on behalf of the Chinese Government. Nearly 300,000 Chinese nationals go to the US on student visas every year who are likely to consider studies in other English-speaking countries such as Australia.

University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine, photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra on Unsplashed