How Non-Genuine International Students Game Australia's Visa System
And How Some Universities Are Helping Them Do It
Since 2022, Australia has been inundated with non-genuine international students whose true objective is access to the country’s labour market. They exploit loopholes in Australia’s visa system and eagerness of Australia’s universities to admit them. You can read all about it in my new paper for the Menzies Research Centre:
International Student Course-Hopping: University Complicity and Government Inaction
One popular strategy is for students to enrol at public universities (which have high visa acceptance rates), commence study onshore, then immediately drop out. There are 11 public universities in Australia where dropout rates exceed 30% for commencing (first-year) international undergraduate students. Central Queensland University tops the list at 57.2%.
But the non-genuine students who drop out don’t just leave. They transition onto bridging visas while they apply for admission to lower-cost cooking and hospitality programs, a practice called “course-hopping.” The median waiting time for immigration approval for new courses is 28 weeks, during which students retain full work rights. Unsuccessful applicants can appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), where the 42,098 pending “course-hopping” cases constitute more than one-third of the ART’s total caseload. The median waiting time for an ART decision is another 64 weeks, again with full work rights.
This is all legal. But it only happens because Australia gives essentially unlimited work rights to international students. During the teaching semester, international student hours are technically limited, but those limits are not enforced. When a student drop-out is on a bridging visa, there are no limits at all. From the non-genuine student’s point of view, the long waits on bridging visas are not a deterrent. They are a desirable feature of the system.
The net result is that even non-genuine international students whose course-hopping applications are refused can generally obtain the right to work in Australia for more than two years for less than $25,000 in total tuition and fees — consisting of one semester’s tuition, health insurance, and a series of application and filing fees. As of mid-2025, there were an extraordinary 107,274 erstwhile students in Australia on bridging visas, up from 13,034 in 2023. That’s more than one-tenth of the entire international student cohort.
But the process doesn’t end there. Even if the ART denies an onshore visa renewal, non-genuine students can apply for asylum in Australia. When these applications are denied (as they almost always are), the denials can be appealed back to the ART. Success rates appear to be very low, but once again the wait times can extend a non-genuine student’s right to work in Australia by several additional years.
Many outer-metropolitan and regional universities have taken advantage of the non-genuine demand for student visas by opening low-cost Sydney city campuses. Roughly half of these campuses are actually operated under contract by for-profit companies. By offering Sydney campuses, regional universities can profit from the strategic behaviour of non-genuine international students, many of whom never engage meaningfully with the courses they enrol in, while funneling these students directly to their preferred work location: Sydney.
As with so many other aspects of Australia’s temporary migration system, it’s all a rort. It’s a profitable rort for universities — and for the companies that exploit this large pool of insecure, unskilled labor. For the hard-working temporary immigrants from India and Nepal who make up the majority of this labor pool, it’s a risky bet on making enough money in Australia to justify the up-front costs of immigration. For those who end up sick, injured, or just plain unemployed, it can lead to financial ruin for their families, and potentially worse. There’s no social safety net for these highly vulnerable workers.
In my MRC paper, I recommend a simple solution for ending the non-genuine student abuse of the immigration system: require students who drop out of their initial programs to return home and reapply from offshore for any future study. This policy would be easy to implement and automatic in its operation. It’s an easy win for any government willing to take it.
International study should not be a low-cost labor program. If Australia wants access to a large pool of immigrant labor to staff its convenience stores, deliver its food, and keep wages down, it should put in place a formal guest worker program. Personally, I’d rather live in a high-wage country that relies on mechanization and self-service to meet its needs. But I’m not Australian. This report gives Australians the data they need to make informed decisions about their own country’s immigration programs — and to pressure their government for policy action.
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