Assistant International Education Minister Julian Hill is reported to be concerned he may have “over-corrected” on student visa integrity.

He is actually referring to the massive increase in offshore student visa refusals that have been key to reducing the student contribution to Net Overseas Migration (NOM). So why does he need to correct that?

After Education Minister Jason Clare announced that the National Planning Level (NPL) for new overseas student commencements would increase from 270,000 in 2025 to 295,000 in 2026 (and 295,000 in 2027), education providers naturally boosted recruitment efforts leading a quick recovery in offshore student applications. Education providers would have budgeted for the extra revenue.

At the time of Clare’s announcement last August, nothing was said by the four ministers involved in the announcement about the impact of the increased NPL numbers on Treasury’s forecasts of Net Overseas Migration. Inconsistent with policy settings at the time, it showed a significant decline.

I was told by one of the ministers that NOM was “just a statistical measure” and nothing to worry about.

As the public debate on NOM levels and mismanagement of immigration heated up, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese increasingly reassured the public that Treasury’s NOM forecasts would be delivered (unlike using the excuses of the past). Treasury NOM forecasts were at last talked about as targets.

Hill acted to drive down the offshore student grant rate ostensibly to address concerns about student visa integrity. In the first six months of 2026, the offshore student grant rate averaged 71 per cent compared with 88 per cent in the first six months of 2025.

Source: data.gov.au/studentvisaprogram

Understandably, the offshore application rate fell sharply in response to the surge in refusals (as well as the global, record-breaking increase in student visa application fees).

Clare’s NPL allocations to each provider became increasingly meaningless. The number of offshore student visas granted in August and September 2026 fell dramatically (see Chart 1).

Outside Covid, it had not been at this level since 2012, prior to implementation of the Knight Review that was designed to boost student visas.

Combined with the additional visa tightening recently announced by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, continuation of the August/September 2026 level of student visa grants would deliver a NOM outcome below the Treasury forecasts. While done in a hastily designed and ham-fisted way, the objective of getting NOM below forecasts looks to have been achieved.

But if the August/September 2026 student grant levels were continued, university budgets would be smashed, forcing taxpayer-funded bailouts.

So now Hill is saying he wants to increase grant rates as long as application rates are contained by using more stringent financial criteria. The departments of home affairs and education are apparently consulting on that.

Combined with the now meaningless NPL allocations to each provider, there are three problems with that approach. It is:

• inefficient, as it is still heavily reliant on resource-intensive student visa-processing at a time departments are being forced to cut down on staffing;
• untargeted in terms of academic ability of students to do the courses they are enrolled for; and
• opaque in terms of visa application outcomes.

A better approach would be a standardised university entrance exam. For no known reason, the government continues to resist this, and apparently universities don’t like it either. Do either of them think the current approach is better?

The other aspect of the student visa program that remains largely unaddressed is the untargeted nature of the temporary graduate visa.

If the government wants to reduce the number of people in immigration limbo, as it has said for years that it wants to, it must target the temporary graduate visa to Australia’s long-term skill needs, not just to any course a student may have done.

If it now wants to increase student visa grants to sustain university budgets, it has no choice but to better target temporary graduate visas to ensure it remains on track to deliver the reduced NOM it says it is now targeting.