UK citizen Tim tells Crikey he spent $3200 on a visa to live out his dream of staying in Australia, on top of $42,000 in tuition fees, making him reluctant to flee in the face of the pandemic. He explains the costly reason he’s decided to stay.
I’m a recent international graduate, having studied a Master’s in accounting in Sydney for the last two years.
It’s been an expensive couple of years: the tuition fees are huge and applying for a graduate visa is no modest amount either (particularly if you include agency fees). I’ve spent $3200 on my visa, and $42,000 on tuition.
That being said, I love Australia and am willing to do all I can to stay here.
COVID-19 has left us in a state of limbo — the goal for many of us after graduation is to earn enough points to attain permanent residency, which for now will have to be shelved. The new priority is making sure we’re financially stable.
My office has seen its hours cut dramatically with projects put on hold. I am a casual office worker, and while my team have done their best to look out for me, nobody can offer any guarantees.
I had optimistically hoped there might be maintenance support from the UK embassy or the Australian government, but the message has been very much to clear off and come home. I appreciate as non-residents we aren’t the Australian government’s first priority, but I had hoped we would have been treated with a bit more empathy, given so many international students have worked so hard and paid so much for the privilege of being here.
The clock continues to tick on my visa and it’s becoming increasingly likely my two-year plan will have to go from shelved to scrapped.
*Tim asked for his surname to be withheld
NOTE: This article has been updated to correct an error in the cost of the visa.
In a reverse I have a son who is a student in New York. He has not returned after the threat of losing his student visa if he did. Studying in another country is an enormous commitment for many, and the time frames involved have only become clear over the weeks. Perhaps all countries could have some reciprocal support for foreign students.
Holy Ca$h Cow$ fee-paying foreign students are a certainty for mistreatment by a vicious, grasping, soulless ruling clique that is interested only in how much money it can strip from a victim.
Australia is one of the world’s most expensive destinations for international students, who are usually badly informed, often duped, and struggle to earn enough to make ends meet. Many students live in (reportedly often foreign-owned) squalid and overcrowded share-houses or dilapidated flats. Those who move further out of the city for less exorbitant rents are hit by high transport costs.
Exploited Holy Ca$h Cow$ fee-paying foreign students aren’t going to complain – their aim is permanent residency. Such a hope depends on them allowing their employers to cheat them (eagerly supported by politicians and the Den of Thieves (CCI, AiG, NFF, PGA, etc)) – any complaint and a word from their cheating employer is enough for dutton’s thugs to cancel their visa.
But labour and education and housing exploitation of Holy Ca$h Cow$ fee-paying foreign students should be of great concern to us. Though officially justified by the cynical pretence that we financially benefit from institutionalised exploitation, those same politicians are extremely happy to ensure that we share it.
Good luck Tim. Yes, it’s an entirely exploitative arrangement, you with Australia in an honest attempt to gain residency, the Govt, the universities and every govt agency against you now that you aren’t the cash cow they were hoping for. And the Australian economy generally, and employer groups.
It’s a tough road, but Morrison had to be dragged into helping workers including long term casuals. You’ll be well down the list I’m afraid.
OK I am not talking about Tim per se because he is just working to the rules that exist. However I would like to say something about the rules.
I think it is not a good arrangement for Australia to link studying here with getting to migrate here. I think what is happening is that many people come here on an international student visa primarily as a pathway to residency and that the degree is a secondary consideration.
I think coupling these two commodities (degree and residency) has allowed the universities to lower standards because the market is not paying for the degree so much as for a way into permanent residency.
I think if there was no way that studying in Australia could be segued into permanent residency, i.e. if you had to go home after your degree and then apply to migrate here, then our degrees would be way less popular with international students and those that did choose to purchase one would insist on better value for money.
I think Australia needs migrants but I think this way of attracting them is not good for our university system, because it gives universities perverse incentives that result in lower education standards achieving higher revenue.
I think we don’t talk about this enough because
a) there’s no official policy to discuss, it is just done and
b) you can’t say anything at all about migration without being labelled racist.
I think the result is we have lost the beautiful punching-above-its-weight tertiary education system that was so carefully built for us by our previous generations.
Anyway that’s what I think.
Universities are completely reliant on the funding from international students, it would take a huge funding overhaul in order to remove it from the equation now. Just with the cancellation of student visas for semester 1 this year, each of the big universities are facing a losses of >$200M in revenue and most have put all new contracts on hold.
I agree.
Missing in discussion about overseas students in this Time of Covid-19 is the horrible reality that the $30 billion pa Australian Education Export industry is a huge confidence trick and rip-off in which governments, universities, unions and media are complicit through their silence. Covid-19 has exposed this massive fraud by showing that top quality, accredited school and university education can be delivered off-campus and on-line effectively for free. I am well aware of this, having taught science students at a big Australian university over 4 decades and having ethically and publicly advocated Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) or Reading Only Tertiary Education (paradoxical acronym ROTE, remember “books”?) for decades (e.g. see “Free University Education”: https://sites.google.com/site/freeuniversityeducation/home and “Crisis in our universities”: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/crisis-in-our-universities/3490214 ). In short, every country needs a large and well-funded cohort of science, technology, medical and other scholars for a variety of compelling security, health, economic and prestige reasons, but why should impoverished Australian teenagers and dishonestly ripped-off overseas students have to pay for it? Neoliberal Hawke Labor re-introduced university fees in 1989 but nearly everyone in look-the-other-way Australia (apart from the Greens) has kept silent about this massive fraud. For several decades on-campus courses charging huge fees have in reality been delivered on-line at miniscule cost and immense profit – an extreme example of Polya’s 3 Laws of Economics (based on the 3 Laws of Thermodynamics) and which state that (1) Profit = Price – Cost of Production, (2) Deception about Cost of Production strives to a maximum, and (3) No Production, Price, or Profit on a dead planet.