Inside International Education

One Nation’s Take on Student Visas, GS Requirements and Planning Levels

The 2026 National Planning Level is 295,000. That is 25,000 higher than 2025. Over the same window, enrolments fell.

In the year to February 2026, 622,043 international students were studying in Australia. That is down 7.7 per cent on the same period last year. Commencements dropped 5.7 per cent. New students fell 5.6 per cent. The planning level went up. The actual numbers went down.

This is not a contradiction. It is the whole point.

The cap was never binding. In 2024 to 2025, the planning level sat at 270,000. The system delivered 234,040 student visas. The sector spent a year arguing about a ceiling that nothing was pressing against. The number was symbolic then. It is symbolic now. Raising it to 295,000 changes the headline and almost nothing else.

What actually sets intake sits further down the stack

Start with refusals. In February 2026, 40 per cent of Indian applicants to Australian universities were refused. For Bangladesh the figure was 51 per cent. For Nepal it was 65 per cent. These are higher education applicants, not the sector total, and the gap between the planning ambition and the processing reality runs straight through those numbers. China is not filling it. Chinese visa lodgements fell 39 per cent in February, the weakest in over a decade.

Most of those refusals trace to one mechanism: the Genuine Student requirement, now the leading reason student applications fail. I covered how it works in last week’s edition. The point here is structural. The cap did not produce this drop. The assessment did, and it bites hardest in exactly the markets where the evidence level just rose.

GS does not act alone. Ministerial Direction 115 replaced MD111 in November and throttles processing by provider allocation. The visa application fee is now 2,000 dollars, up from 1,600 last July and from 710 two years ago. Each lever pulls the same way. Together they set a ceiling far below 295,000, and they do it quietly.

The headline hides the composition

The decline is not evenly spread. Higher education enrolments actually grew 3 per cent in the year to February. ELICOS fell 31 per cent. The pain is concentrated in the parts of the sector with the least pricing power and the shortest enrolment cycles. A planning number averaged across all of that tells you nothing about who is actually under water.

Now look at the politics

The number is stranded from the other direction too. One Nation is rising in the polls, and this week it put international students back at the centre of its migration platform. Its standing position is a hard cap on foreign students and a total visa cap of 130,000, which the party frames as cutting immigration by more than 500,000 on current settings. On Tuesday it added a specific measure: students who drop out would be barred from appealing to the Administrative Review Tribunal and required to leave the country before applying to study again. Hanson’s framing was blunt. Universities are addicted to foreign student money, and some students never intended to study at all.

Set that against a government that lifted the planning level to 295,000 and cannot fill it. The headline number now pleases no one. It is too high for the politics gathering around it, and too high for the demand actually arriving. The live policy energy is not in the cap. It is in enforcement: bridging visas, course-hopping, tribunal appeals, dropout rules.

So here is the read. The policy conversation is still organised around the cap. That conversation is finished. The number is a target nobody is hitting, in a year when demand is the binding constraint. The settings that matter are risk ratings, processing directions, and fee levels, and none of them are debated with the same heat as the headline figure.

Watch ATEC instead. The interim commission is moving to university-by-university compacts for 2027. That is where allocation stops being a national number and becomes an institutional one, negotiated provider by provider, with far less visibility. The cap was a blunt public instrument. What replaces it will be precise and largely private.

The ceiling moved. Most of the sector is still looking up at the old one.

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