Australia’s universities are seeing a surge in “phantom” international students, as some foreigners enrol in order to gain work rights and entry into the country before dropping out of their degrees or failing to show up at all.
The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) 2024 annual report revealed a retention rate of just 53.6% for first-year international students, and cited “an unusually high number of students who did not meaningfully engage from the outset”, The Australian reported.
Griffith University in Brisbane also reported a below-average retention rate among its foreign students in 2024, with one in four dropping out and those from Africa and the subcontinent overrepresented among those who went missing.
“Recent retention rates for international cohorts from countries like Kenya, Pakistan and parts of India have been lower than our targets,” a spokesperson said.
The university said an “evolving international student landscape” and the “flexibility students have under current regulations … to transfer to other institutes after six months” were contributing factors, along with “course hopping”.
QUT did not report which regions of the world its “phantom” students were from, how much money they had paid, or where they had gone, but a spokesperson said: “QUT, along with many other institutions, experienced an unusually high attrition rate among some cohorts of international students during the reported year.”
CQ University had an international student dropout rate of 67%, and Federation University’s was 47.9%, according to the education department’s latest data, recorded in 2022. That year the national dropout rate for foreign students averaged 13.2%.
At the same time, statistics from the Administrative Review Tribunal show the number of international students challenging their visas decisions has exploded from around 14% to almost two-thirds (61.7%) of the tribunal’s workload.
Colombia, for example, has entered Australia’s top five list of asylum-seeker applicants, overwhelmingly as a result of the explosion in the number of Colombians here on student visas.
Former immigration department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi said Australia’s student visa situation will be a “compounding problem” as “student visa holders will remain onshore while their cases are processed by the tribunal”.
The revelations come after the federal government last year shut down 150 “ghost colleges” and issues warning notices to about 140 more, sparking complaints from visa-scamming Indian students who paid upfront for courses they never attended.
This has resulted in a further drop in confidence in Australia’s higher-education providers among the public and within academia, with peak body Public Universities Australia lodging a senate submission last month warning that falling standards were “putting lives at risk”.
Header image: QUT (By Kgbo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link).
