Strengthening international education and introducing targeted visa settings will be critical to ensuring Australia has access to the global talent pool and skilled workforce essential to meet the demands of new and emerging critical industries.The Group of Eight (Go8) says an incoming Government must prioritise international education which is central to Australia’s future prosperity. International education and research are directly linked to economic growth and the opportunity of higher living standards.Essential Decisions for National Success: Supporting Australia’s international education and research sector is the latest in a series of policy papers from the Go8 in the lead up to the…

Agents as gatekeepers to higher educationFacing continuous budget cuts, Canadian universities and colleges saw the eligibility of Indian students for the Student Direct Stream (SDS) visa as an opportunity to increase revenues. In an interview in The Runner, KPU’s student newsletter, the former provost acknowledged, “[it] has turned into an aggressive market” (cited in Keller, 2018, para. 8). KPU facilitated a sharp increase in PS admission, often at the expense of the quality of service these students received. An administrator shared,We were given a target: “You need to double our international students in 12 months.” All we worked on was to…

International students are heading to Canada, the UK and the US in record numbers despite the pandemic, new research by the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University shows. But Australia and New Zealand continue to experience a dramatic drop in new international students. The Mitchell Institute report on the global impact of the pandemic on international students. Author provided Our report, Student, interrupted: international education and the pandemic, examined five major destinations for international students: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. We found the first waves of the pandemic caused a large fall in new international students. But…

Quebec court refuses to intervene for Indian students in limbo – New Canadian Media Source

The (DHA) will readily deliver and manage the 160,000 migration program visas in 2021-22. Image: iStock On the 160,000 migration program in 2021-22, the Australian Financial Review reports that Morrison said “we’re not even going to get close to that cap (sic) in the short term because we are seeking to rebuild the program, re-open the lines of people being able to come to Australia”. This is just rubbish as the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) will readily deliver the 160,000 migration program visas in 2021-22 and is in fact managing places carefully to not go over 160,000. The visa…

Education agents warn that foreign students are not queuing up to return to New Zealand next year. Photo: 123RF They told RNZ this country’s handling of the pandemic was not the drawcard the government had expected and recently-announced changes to post-study work rights would hit the Indian market especially hard. International education used to be New Zealand’s fourth biggest export earner at $5 billion a year, but pandemic border restrictions restricted enrolments to the point that by the start of April there were 11,803 students remaining in the country. The government recently announced that a freeze on study visa applications…

Abiodun, an international student from Nigeria, holds an unconditional offer to study postgraduate International Business at the University of Chester. The course was due to start on May 2 and Abiodun applied for his visa on April 11.  The UK government website advises overseas students that they will normally receive a visa decision within three weeks, but Abiodun (who does not wish to publish his last name) has now been waiting for five weeks.  He described the wait as “torturing”, saying that “it seems like we are on our own and can do nothing about the situation”.  In March, the…

In a recent PIE Chat Live, university payments company WPM’s director Holger Bollmann said that universities could be putting themselves at risk when accepting payments from international students. “People are trying to find creative ways of bypassing these controls, for good reason – Nigeria is a good example, as there are daily limits on foreign exchange,” Bollmann told The PIE. “We often hear stories of Nigerian students find using a black-market method is often safer, quicker and cheaper – and as a consequence there is an opportunity for third parties, sometimes nefarious, sometimes not, to give students options where that payment…

The backlog of permanent and temporary residency and citizenship applications waiting to be processed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) stood at more than 2.1 million at the start of this month – and the government is blaming the COVID-19 Canada immigration news: The backlog of permanent and temporary residency and citizenship applications waiting to be processed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) stood at more than 2.1 million at the start of this month. “While Canada welcomed the highest number of permanent residents in a single year in 2021 by processing a record number of applications, border…