Does Australia really need one million international student enrolments?
Data from the Department of Education has revealed just how broken Australia’s immigration system truly is – and it’s hurting our vulnerable the most.
As of 2025, Australia has 996,618 foreign student enrolments – up from 882,482 in 2020 – out of 821,553 total foreign students.
Meaning roughly one in every 33 people in Australia is an international student, the most in the world per capita.
That’s about double the population of Canberra – a truly dizzying amount.
Most of them crowd into major capital cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, where the rental vacancy rate is as low as one per cent.
This has dramatically increased demand and pushed rental prices through the roof.
That is, if you’re lucky enough to have a roof over your head.
The ABC reported last month that Brisbane homelessness services have seen a 48 per cent increase in the number of children needing support, with housing affordability being the major driver.
Meaning Australians are being forced into homeless shelters while Labor rolls out the red carpet for foreign students.
And don’t think their impact on housing is restricted to just renting, it’s not.
International students also have the option to buy homes in Australia.
In late 2023, the SBS ran a story about a 23-year-old Chinese international student who – struggling to find a rental property – simply got her parents to help her purchase a property.
Home buyers no longer have to just compete with other Australians to buy a home; they also have to compete with the children of the world’s wealthy, too, it seems.
How this absurd situation helps working Australians is anyone’s guess.
A common argument often made in defence of our enormous foreign student population is that these students, once they graduate, will go on to join the workforce to help plug skills gaps in the economy.
But even the Treasury now admits that isn’t true, writing in a labour market whitepaper that “more than 50 per cent of international student graduates end up in jobs at the lowest two skill levels despite being qualified for the top level.”
Younger school leavers and lower-skilled Australians are now having to compete with highly qualified migrants just to find the most basic jobs in cafes, supermarkets, and warehouses.
These outcomes hurt Australia’s vulnerable the most.
Imagine a single parent without a university education trying to get ahead with rising rent costs and tougher job competition.
Imagine a young Australian family having to compete with the world’s wealthy just to get on the housing ladder.
Imagine a retired pensioner forced to live in a share house because of a tight rental market.
These are all scenarios worsened – and often caused – by the government’s open-border approach to international students.
The other common refrain is that international students help subsidise domestic students.
Yet the fact that Australia once had free higher education at a time when we had next to no international students shoots that down pretty quickly.
Combine that with the fact that university rankings are falling while the foreign student population is exploding.
There are multiple ways to subsidise local education – and whatever is happening now is clearly not working.
Australians are well and truly being left behind by the open-borders international student system.
And unlike for foreign students, if it doesn’t work out for them, there’s no other country for them to move back to – Australia is it, it’s all we have.
At a national level, delivering housing and well-paying jobs to Australians is far more important than educating foreign students.
The Liberal Party is signalling that they’re preparing a new immigration policy framework with a focus on cutting international student numbers.
But if their recent rhetoric is anything to go by, it’s hard to imagine that these proposed cuts will be strong enough to ensure that the Australians who have been left behind by this broken immigration system are put first again.
Time will tell – but time is what we’re running out of.
First published in SkyNews Australia 25 November 2025 as “Does Australia Really Need 1 million International Enrolments?” © Jordan Knight 2025. All Rights Reserved.
