What really draws international students to Australia?

Education is one of Australia’s top exports. But the very students who generate that revenue and contribute to our country’s social fabric are routinely blamed for the cost-of-living and housing crises that currently dominate Australian politics.

Many Australians, including our politicians, seem to believe that international students use their study to access Australia’s labour market and permanent residency rights.

It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong – or at least, badly out of date.

With 592,342 student visa holders in Australia in 2025, international students are the second largest category of temporary visa holders.

Their high visibility in Australian cities has made them a convenient target in public and political debates, particularly in response to growing concern over housing affordability and broader economic uncertainty.

Suspicion of these students has helped push Australia to tighten its student visa rules.

The government has introduced a Genuine Student test and capped international student numbers. It has also raised visa fees and set tougher English language requirements.

But the assumptions oversimplify the story.

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When we look at the enrolment data and research focusing on international students from Vietnam, China and India, a richer and more accurate narrative emerges.

The migration myth

According to the government’s statistics, 60,902 international students were enrolled in Society and Culture programs in 2024, while a further 28,376 were studying Creative Arts.

This is an increase of 12.9 per cent and 11.6 per cent compared with the previous year.

In 2024, Society and Culture was the country’s fourth largest field of education by international enrolment in undergraduate and postgraduate coursework.

Very few of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) subjects these students study appear on Australia’s skills-shortage lists, so they don’t offer a pathway to skilled migration. That’s before counting students in some Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields that don’t lead to migration either.

And this pattern isn’t just in Australia.

In Canada and the UK, social sciences, arts and humanities programs – fields with no direct migration payoff – hold even stronger appeal for international students, accounting for 15 per cent and 20.7 per cent of total enrolments respectively in 2023.

These official figures corroborate what we have observed during two decades of fieldwork across Asia – studying in Australia is by no means always about seeking permanent residency.

We have spent years listening to young people from China, India and Vietnam describe why they really left home and tracked how their motivations have gradually shifted over time.

While some did choose degrees with a direct migration pathway, a significant number (a vast majority in the case of Chinese students) had no migration plan when they first arrived in Australia.

What they talk about instead is passion, personal freedom and the chance to pursue their dreams, alongside improving their chances on job-markets back home.

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Generational shifts

For young people from Asia – and increasingly Africa and South America – education mobility is no longer just a pragmatic cost-benefit equation.

That shift matters, and it has a demographic story behind it.

The middle and elite classes have expanded substantially over the past three decades in China, India and Vietnam and throughout East Asia.

More importantly, the generation now arriving on Australian campuses are born into smaller families.

China’s one-child policy (abolished in 2016), Vietnam’s two-child policy (abolished in 2025), and the rising cost-of- living in India have all concentrated family resources into fewer children.

These are young people whose mobility is not driven by household economic survival, especially given the outsize fees they and their families pay to Australian universities.

They are moving on their own terms – chasing personal ambitions and desires that were previously more secondary to the family’s collective needs, if they were considered at all.

Stories from Vietnam, China and India

Our collective research bears this out starkly.

For middle-class Vietnamese migrants, permanent residency was rarely the whole story. For a growing number of younger interviewees, it wasn’t the story at all.

Participants said they came to Australia because it gave them the “clarity about what I hope for”.

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Others also talked about wanting to see the world, to live as an openly gay man, or simply to be free from the social pressure and scrutiny that shaped their choices at home.

For many Vietnamese female students, overseas study became a way of resisting expectations that tie a woman’s worth and identity to marriage and motherhood.

Research on Chinese women studying in Australia tells a similar story.

For many young women born under China’s one-child policy, studying abroad offered an escape from the pressure to marry and settle down by a certain age. It also gave them a chance to build an independent, cosmopolitan sense of self.

Life in Australia offers a slower pace, a break from the competitive study and work cultures at home, and a chance to experiment with alternative value systems.

Research on India’s fragmented middle class adds another layer.

Many Indian students have historically sought work overseas to pay off significant debts from studying abroad. This is perhaps why they are seen as the greatest risk of being ‘non-genuine’ in student visa applications.

But recent survey data suggests most now plan to return to India to work after studying overseas. These students approach a global education in many different ways, and painting them all with the same brush does them an injustice.

Consider the complicated truth

None of this suggests that practical, economic factors aren’t a key consideration for international students.

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For many, permanent residency remains a central factor in the decision to study in Australia.

Sometimes, as we have found, it is the whole point.

But treating every international student as a permanent residency-seeker flattens a far more complicated and fluid picture.

We need to recognise a fundamental generational shift, driven by the economic success of Asia’s middle classes.

For this generation, mobility is increasingly about leisure, autonomy and the freedom to define a good life on their own terms.