Iain Watt

Visa delays and refusals are playing havoc with Australian universities’ course and financial planning, weeks ahead of the new semester starting July/August.

Median visa processing time frames for higher education students have more than tripled in the past few months, according to the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). Fifty percent of applicants are kept waiting at least 47 days for their paperwork to be processed — up from 14 days in February — with 10 percent of students experiencing delays of at least four months. Meanwhile, refusal rates for offshore visa applicants are running at almost three times the pre-Covid average. Overall, one in five applications is rejected, including about one in three from India, one in two from Nepal and three in five from Pakistan.

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) says its deadline for South Asian students to accept enrolment offers used to be about a month before the start of a semester. Visa processing delays have forced the institution to increase the buffer period, according to deputy vice-chancellor Iain Watts. “If they haven’t accepted their offers by about two months before the start of term, we won’t confirm their enrolments because we know they won’t get a visa in time,” says Watt.

According to Watt, UTS could lose more than A$100 million (Rs.559 crore) in tuition fees from students who would have been able to enrol this year but for the visa processing changes and delays over the past six months.

UTS is one of 16 universities that has managed to retain their Level 1 immigration risk rating despite a widespread increase in visa rejections. “You can imagine what it’s like for institutions that are rated at Level 2 or 3, and have been put at the back of the visa processing queue,” says Watt.

DHA figures show that demand for Australian education remains strong. Some 185,000 would-be students applied from overseas for higher education visas over the 11 months to May — slightly more than over the same period a year earlier, and more than 50 percent more than in pre-Covid times. But the number of visas issued so far this calendar year is 26 percent lower than in the equivalent period of 2023.

Watt says all but five Oz varsities are losing students to other countries, principally the US but also non-anglophone destinations such as Germany and Malaysia, “because we’re perceived as not as welcoming as we used to be”. He doesn’t expect visa processing to improve before the next federal election. “All of this is about political parties wanting to show that they’re in control of migration numbers.”