This week Arun Jacob, Managing Director of Array Globe in India, writes about the recent changes in Australia’s skilled migration policy.

“I can state with a lot of confidence that the primary motive for the majority of Indian students going to Australia is the education to migration pathway. This also tacitly means that the average student from India will take up any course that has a reasonable promise of a job at the end of it and which will eventually lead to the much coveted migration. (This does not however imply that all students from India fall into this category. Far from this there are many who actually excel academically at prestigious universities doing masters and PhDs and go on to play important roles in their chosen fields.)

So the courses offered by VET and private sector colleges fall rather nicely into this equation. The highlights being - short duration, competitive fees, lower academic and Ielts requirement for admission, reasonably high chances of getting a visa, vocational skills that will help in finding a job, etc. It is a reasonable assumption that a good 50 per cent or more students from India end up in the VET and private sector colleges.    

So any policy change that seeks to disturb this is bound to have a huge negative impact on the Indian market not only personally for Array Globe but across the board. It is a strong assumption that the numbers will drop quite alarmingly especially coming in the wake of the really negative publicity of racist attacks on Indian students in Australia over the past few weeks. It is of course quite clear to see why Australia wants to tighten up on this issue. Which country wants to create a clear immigration pathway to students of questionable standards? So I am not going to pillory the Australians for this but it will be interesting to see what kind of adjustments they will make to protect the commercial interests of the export education industry of their country.

Will this help other countries? Of course it will. But even as I write this, New Zealand has also announced a tightening of their policy along similar lines and UK has just done a pretty impressive blanket ban of issue of students visas to the whole of north India. Thankfully they realised their folly and retracted this rather quickly. The bottom line is that no country will allow their education sectors to become conduits of sub-standard migration. One solution – promote your top end institutions and courses more aggressively and rein in the smaller VET type and private providers. The focus should be on quality always and that is bound to give fabulous long term results even if it hurts in the short term.”