A reset for Australia’s student visa policy: are we counting students and missing the economic value?

For three years, Australians have argued about how many international students should come here. Tighter visa rules, lower migration targets and housing stress have driven the fight.

Something is missing from it. Few people ask what cutting student numbers does to jobs, household spending, universities, skills and our standing abroad. We do have a test case. We lived through one.

What the pandemic showed

In 2019, international education earned Australia A$40.1 billion. In 2020 that fell to A$31.7 billion. In 2021 it hit A$22.0 billion. Two years, an A$18 billion drop, 45 per cent gone.

Against the 2019 level, we lost about A$26.4 billion in export income across 2020 and 2021.

That’s gross export income, not lost tax revenue. Still, it’s big. The Centre for Future Work found tertiary education employment fell by about 40,000 positions in the year to May 2021, all at public institutions. Border closures were one cause among several. Universities were also shut out of JobKeeper.

Today’s visa changes aren’t the pandemic. I’m not claiming they’ll cause the same losses, and the government says they’re about integrity and stopping abuse. But 2020 and 2021 showed how tightly education is woven into the economy. We should take the numbers seriously.

The recovery

The sector bounced back fast. Education exports rose from A$26.6 billion in 2022 to A$46.9 billion in 2023, A$51.5 billion in 2024 and A$55.0 billion in 2025. Of the 2025 total, about A$24.4 billion was tuition. The other A$30.4 billion was students paying for housing, food, transport and everything else.

Here’s a sense of scale. Say a student spends A$30,000 a year on tuition and A$30,000 on living costs. Over a three-year degree, that’s A$180,000. Ten thousand student-years at that rate is A$600 million. It’s an illustration, not an official average, and not a forecast of what current policy will cost. What happens in practice depends on how universities, households and other markets respond.

The work they do

We argue a lot about students and housing. We rarely talk about their work. Many students work in aged care, hospitality, retail, cleaning and delivery, within the hours their visas allow. Think of Sunday nights in an aged care home. Public holidays. An office cleaned after everyone has gone home. Citizens, permanent residents and other migrants do these jobs too, and students are part of that mix.

The Reserve Bank estimates students made up 2 to 3 per cent of the labour force before the pandemic. From 2016 to 2019, 37.4 per cent of working students were in accommodation and food, against 7.0 per cent of the whole workforce. By 2023, health care’s share of working students had climbed from 11.5 to 17.0 per cent. The Bank also notes that students from Nepal and India tend to work more than average.

The ABS estimates that about A$15.6 billion of student spending in 2024-25, around a third of the A$53.6 billion total, was funded by wages earned here. That money sits inside the export figure, so it isn’t new income from abroad, and critics argue the headline overstates what the country earns. It does show that students are workers as well as customers. On the RBA’s estimate, they still spent more than three times what they earned in 2023-24.

None of this excuses underpaying them. Students’ work hours are capped, and they deserve the same protections as everyone else. Whether fewer students would strain the labour market depends on whether employers can find replacements.