Australia is leaving thousands of international graduates in visa limbo, and it’s about to get worse
- Written by Brendan Coates, Program Director, Economic Policy, Grattan Institute
Many international students come to Australia with the hope of staying permanently.
But our latest report, Graduates in limbo: International student visa pathways after graduation[1], shows that the rights Australia grants international students to stay and work here after they graduate are too generous, offering many false hope.
Australia offers graduating students much longer temporary visas than our main competitors[2] for international students, such as Canada, the UK and the US.
But many temporary graduate visa holders struggle to pursue their chosen careers in Australia, with
- only half securing full-time employment
- most working in low-skilled jobs
- and half earning less than A$53,300 a year, compared to just one-third of all graduates.
Outcomes are often not matching the effort
More than half of these visa holders work in jobs that don’t even require a tertiary qualification. In fact, the incomes of temporary graduate visa holders look more like those of working holiday makers, most of whom come to Australia to travel.
Fewer international graduates now get permanent visas A growing number of international graduates are stuck in visa limbo in Australia, with less than one-third of temporary graduate visa holders now transitioning to permanent residency when their visa expires, down from two-thirds in 2014. One in three return to further study here once their visa expires, mostly in cheaper vocational courses, to prolong their stay in Australia. Encouraging so many international graduates to stay and struggle in Australia is in no one’s interests. It damages the reputation of our international higher education sector and erodes public trust in our migration program. It hurts the long-term prospects of those graduates who do stay permanently. It adds to population pressures and housing prices. And it’s unfair to those graduates who invest years in Australia with little prospect of securing permanent residency. And recent policy changes will only make this problem worse. The Albanese government’s decision[5] at last year’s Jobs and Skills Summit to extend the length of temporary visas for international graduates is a big reason why we should expect their numbers to nearly double to about 370,000 by 2030. Some students studying in the regions can now stay and work in Australia on a temporary visa for up to eight years after they graduate. Unless the number of permanent visas on offer each year rises, which seems unlikely[6], many more graduates will be left in limbo in the future. 
