Population growth from international students has ruined Australian housing.
The government handed universities free reign to hand out as many visa as they liked, and they handed out millions.
And the unspoken deal is that you're not buying an education, you're buying residency in Australia because a large percentage of these students never go home again.
And the government has staunchly - ridiculously - stated for years that international students do not impact housing. Yeah right - they don't live anywhere.
It's just a vast population growth program under the guise of international education with immigrants required to pay their $50K to universities for the nod and a wink right to live here.
Australia, which already had a housing crisis, now has a housing nuclear inferno.
Absolutely out of control population growth. The governments do it because more people equals "growing economy" - the only thing they care about.
And they don't invest in the infrastructure to support the millions of people added to the population so the quality of life goes down for everyone, there's budget cuts in government services, the inequality gap widens.
Growth - through population growth, through "international students" - governments absolutely love it because it hides their bad economic management, and the rich people declare how wonderful massive population growth is because those rich people own at least 3 houses.
The entire game is rigged for rich people to get rich and everyone else to shove over and make room because there's a lot more people coming.
> Population growth from international students has ruined Australian housing.
If that is so, why is Australia's housing problem Australia wide and not isolated to high student population locations?
Australia's problem with housing is Australia hasn't/doesn't treat housing as housing, they have treated it as a tax efficient investment vehicle with negative gearing.
I don't know about all the factors. But I know we had the same debate in Canada recently. And yes rent prices in Toronto and most major cities declined noticiby immediately after we introduced caps on international students.
Also I worry some people in these discussions might be speaking out of a worry about preventing racism which distorts discussion of the issue at hand - the effect students have on housing prices
And would you believe, now that those tax policies have been changed the house price is going down…
The reason there is a housing problem is that you cannot build houses as quickly as people can (and do) arrive by plane and settle permanently in a country. It is primarily, though not entirely, an immigration problem.
Your children per women is 1.4 are you really complaining that you can supplement with highly educated youth? If housing is an issue blame your government for shit policy.
The people complaining about the international students don't care about the population replacement rate - they only care about their own individual circumstance at this point in time, not some 50-80 years in the future (where the 1.4 replace rate starts being a problem).
> they only care about their own individual circumstance at this point in time
Which are circumstances that they should care about. Unfortunately many are also prone to falling for dog whistles about international students which aren't the root cause of their problems and distract from getting deep into the weeds about real issues with Australian housing.
Without affordable housing there will no be birth rate increase.
There are two reasons why the UK does not have affordable housing:
1) land hoarded by the feudal aristocracy (parasites descended from thugs), who do not pay property taxes because there are effectively none (wouldn't want Chuck von Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg und Gotha to pay taxes, now, would we?). Most people in the UK do not own the land under their lodging due to the feudal practice of leasehold, and have to pay rent on it and are constrained from doing even essential maintenance like fire safety without the permission of the freeholder.
2) NIMBYs, generally older and Tory, who vote to block construction and are pandered to by pretty much every major party
Granted, England has twice the population density of Japan, but Tokyo somehow manages to have affordable housing.
> England has twice the population density of Japan, but Tokyo somehow manages to have affordable housing.
The UK has a lower population density, and Britain (roughly the same size) a much lower density than Honshu - and England is about the same as Honshu.
> land hoarded by the feudal aristocracy (parasites descended from thugs), who do not pay property taxes because there are effectively none
Also other rich people.
> Most people in the UK do not own the land under their lodging due to the feudal practice of leasehold
Not most. its 19% of dwellings, and as they tend to be smaller households a smaller proportion of people live in them https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/leasehold-dwellings...
> NIMBYs, generally older and Tory
Mostly Tory? The affluent mostly vote Labour now.
Nor will that be a silver bullet although it will help. Do your research, people with wealth on average have less kids: why have 3 kids if you can be well traveled before youre 35? Theres too much shit to do.
At least in North America the issue is federal and even state governments have divorced interests from municipal governments.
They are setting immigration allowances with respect to growth and financial planning.
Municipalities generally over the last 50 years decided they like their neighborhoods how they are, thank you very much.
Local governments needed to be building for this all along. Now we play catch-up.
Though, also, immigrant students are very desirable due to how much they general pay for school (and this subsidize the rest of the budget), and how little any municipal, state, or federal governments had to pay to produce a productive adult taxpayer.
International students make up about 5% of the total rental housing demand but their impact tends to be felt most in capital cities where the universities are.
Removing them won't improve things as much as you might think.
The housing crisis is a supply and demand problem so they've got to increase housing supply.
The problem there is these is a shortage of construction workers. So the workforce simply isn't there to build more houses. Current construction workforce is 110% maxxed out.
I reckon they should be handing out visas to qualified construction workers left and right to solve that problem, then get the homes built. Dubai and Singapore do this and have no such shortage of construction workers. I can't see why we can't do the same.
Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.
> Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.
Damn right, it's big business for Australia; International education earned Australia $55 billion in 2025 from some ~ 844,000 students that year.
( ~ 850K students has been peak international student population per annum in Australia, its never exceeded a million )
These are temporary education visa's that may in a few cases lead to insecure work visa's in Australia and while some international students may get citizenship after 10 years of expensive and insecure stay in Australia .. the total number of permanent migrants accepted each year is (currently) capped at a modest 185,000 per annum (across the board, not just limited to former international students).
>> The housing crisis is a supply and demand problem so they've got to increase housing supply.
And now the government is creating "activity zones" around every train line where they will pack in super high density housing to pack more and more people in. Communities - the people who live in these "activity zones" hate it.
And new suburbs springing up many kilometers outside the cities - ugly wastelands without trees, without trains, without community. All to stuff in more people because more people is more money.
Why? Why do we want more people? Who voted for it? No-one because no government ever took it to the people because they all do it.
We should be allowed to protest against population growth without being called racists.
Population growth impacts community, environment, social services, quality of life.
Australia has massive droughts in which every drop of water counts but we've forgotten that because there's no drought right now.
>> Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.
I'm sorry I simply do not buy these old "accepted wisdoms" that get rolled out.
Just like the mining industry who try to convince us that without mining Australia's eocnomy would be ruined.
That's always the bottom line - "without this <thing that you want but I don't> then the economy will be ruined" I don't believe it.
> Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.
It will. Because guess what, these students are working jobs (mostly in hospitality) no one else wants to work. Businesses no longer able to find staff.
I agree. The solution isn't cutting overseas students. The solution is to build more houses. To build more houses get more construction workers (who can coincidentally also build houses for themselves).
Nobody wants those jobs because they're illegally paying below award wage and the work conditions are substandard. Domiciled Australians (rightfully) expect fair wage and decent working conditions.
Just do what Singapore does and import migrant construction crews from China or India (or other south Asian countries). You get the standard 33 story concrete blocks that they can build cheaply, and your housing problems are solved. You can even turn them into pseudo public housing (again like Singapore does).
I think in most of the west construction jobs are so incredibly protected and regulated, they just can’t seem to build anything anymore.
1. Ensure that existing housing stock is used efficiently (no empty second homes, empty apartments being treated was an asset).
2. Build more _affordable_ housing stock.
Doesn't seem like that hard.
Two things that won’t happen as the government is very scared of making things uncomfortable for the ones that would see the value in their houses go down.
Because that is what would happen.
Come on, that’s communism! The markets will sort it all out, right? … right?
The whole debacle in UK higher education is the governments own making. It demamded universities operate more like businesses, their funding has been hugely slashed in real terms over the decades, and now its shocked when they priotise sources of income over educating british nationals? The government could fix this mess in a myriad of ways but levying a tax against the unis is not one of them. This is kicking a dying horse.
Im certainly a bit biased as I work in higher education, but I also see first hand the sorry state of affairs successive governments have left their golden "world leading universities" in.
> priotise sources of income over educating british nationals
Education has always been an investment. Tax puts money in education, the country gains in reduced poverty, increased safety, better mental health, etc.
To think about education as a way to earn money was absurd from the beginning. But when billionaires run a country is what you get. Margaret Thatcher started a trend to lie to the public and brainwash them on thinking that public investment is waste. The country is harvesting the lies that she planted. And children and teenagers will get the worse part of it. Sadly, many people still believe in the lies of conservatives and change is difficult when so many people has magical thinking (stop investing, cut taxes, and somehow money will rain from the sky).
To be fair, this happened all across the western world. The US with Reagan, Germany with Kohl and Schröder, and many other countries followed the same path.
Prior to that, neoliberal think tanks have been working for almost decades to prepare the dismantling of the public institutions.
I don't want to absolve Kohl here but personally this sounds like it at most had paved the way. I only started university in 2003, without any fees, and then they were introduced (so 4-5 years after the Kohl era), and then scrapped again as well.
And it somehow worked out well for them, nowadays they got a quite captive voters population.
International students subsidize UK ones, and most UK universities would go bust without them. Cutting their numbers means at best making higher education even more expensive for British students, and endangering one of the few sectors where the UK is still world-class.
The UK enjoys the worst of both worlds: the high taxes of Europe combined with the low benefits of the US like no free higher education (Germany provides free university education even for foreigners, for instance).
> Germany provides free university education even for foreigners, for instance)
Fwiw, Germany is also taking a big chunk ontop.
If you add taxes taken from your wage and VAT, forced social security payments etc all up, you'll end with a rough taxation of ~50% in UK. Of you do the same in Germany you end up over 60%, often nearing 70% unless you're a single income household with kids (they lower the tax burden a lot through deductions. Obviously still expensive, but your social contributions go down a lot.)
It’s around the same in the US tbh. Just looked at my paystub and it’s saying 44% of my gross pay comes out. That’s taxes, oasdi, insurance (and I have a pretty good rate), etc. That’s not including 401k contribution. Then you have of course sales tax, property tax on house and car, insurance on those things, insurance on the mortgage itself
For your effective tax rate to be 44%, you'd have to live in California or New York, be single, and make over $600,000 a year. Insurance can be significant but is still around $12k a year total for most family rates.
(That pay would effectively be almost 10x what the average person in the US makes a year.)
Not even remotely close to 600k lol. Looking at my situation, the federal tax rate is probably like 26%.
That’s without oasdi, Medicare, state taxes, city taxes, and insurance.
44% though was high, you’re right about that, because some of that tax was paid up front off of bonuses and will reduce over the course of the year.
I’ll probably end up around 35% without counting retirement and of course without counting all the other nickle and diming taxes that are paid post tax
Okay, so you live in California or NY and you're hitting a federal cap around the 32% mark on the progressive tax rate.
Ofc not counting social security, medicare, and that state tax that is around half as much as what you are paying federally (which is more than double many other localities).
So you were saying as a combination kind of effective tax rate, got it.
When you first said that 44% number, it was very fishy - because there is a federal cap at 37% :)
so a typical HN poster, if not below the HN average?
I think your perception of this place in 2026 is greatly skewed.
What's next, you tell me you don't have a Putnam?
> The UK enjoys the worst of both worlds: the high taxes of Europe combined with the low benefits of the US like
We have some quite substantial benefits, such as mostly free healthcare.
University tuition fees are heavily subsidised for British students, especially at better universities or expensive to provide subjects. Fees at leading universities are much lower than in the US ( https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/hig... ) - although US universities have more fee waivers for students from lower income families etc. AFAIK it is private money funding that, not public.
Student loans are once again heavily subsidised - the interest rate is inflation.
Not all British universities are world class. The expansion of higher education has increased the number of lower quality universities and courses. In Scotland there are no fees, but a lower proportion of school leavers go to university. The rest of the UK should do at least the same - IMO shut down whole institutions and courses.
> the high taxes of Europe
Taxes in the UK are quite low by European standards. The UK's tax revenue to GDP ratio is similar to Canada's (either a bit lower or a bit higher, depending on year/source).
Canadas taxes are quite high by global standard.
Right, but if you go too far down that table, then you get to countries that you don't necessarily want to live in because of poor civil infrastructure and public services. The US also collects quite a lot of tax revenue as a proportion of GDP by overall global standards. Mexico collects the lowest percentage of any OECD country. The UK and Canada are in the middle of the field.
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-i... (page 8)
Tuition fees for international students were already very expensive in the UK compared to most of the EU. Surely this will only make things worse? Is the goal to reduce the number of int'l students?
I couldn't afford full time tuition in the early 2000s, in spite of working a half time job while at uni.
After Brexit the tuition even for Europeans increased from 10K£ pounds a year to 40K£. A thousand pounds will not change much. It does of course change the kind of people they can admit from abroad, but it seems that the UK has a lot of demand. When I did an Erasmus MSc funded by the EU, I was the only European in the whole cohort. Many peers explicitly told me that they applied to get a chance to stay in Europe after they graduated. Most did.
Universities get a significant portion of their income from international students. Perhaps making them pay a little more for the externalities they create is fair.
Universities are already on their knees, the international fees plug a gap in lack of funding, can already see the struggle with the immigration changes. If the government wants to kneecap unis income levers it also needs to fund them.
I am fully sympathetic with the struggle of universities but perhaps they shouldn't be spared the need to be more responsive to the political and economic climate.
Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" describes a world in which the academy is entirely sheltered from the real world and develops a culture of dependence, detachment and indifference. Do we want that world?
If we throw money at universities to keep doing what they've always done, we'll create institutions that exist only for their own sake and without any real purpose or value outside of a hedonistic pursuit of knowledge.
We should fund universities to serve the people, like the free university places in Scotland. We should fund research and innovation. We should fund the moral and cultural development of citizens and those invested in the future of the country.
But we should be careful we don't accidentally create a system that can't survive in a competitive and changing world.
It depends on the university and the course. Its not going to make much of a difference where the fees are currently £60k/year compared to where they are £15k/year
Context:
> We have also seen a series of problems involving misuse and exploitation of student visas, where visas are used as an entry point for living and working in the UK without any intention to complete the course, and increasing numbers of asylum claims from students at the end of their course, even though nothing substantive has changed in their home country while they have been in the UK.
> In 2021, international students at UK universities generated an estimated £20.65 billion in exports through living expenditure and tuition fees, but it is right that these benefits are shared.[footnote 48] The Government will explore introducing a levy on higher education provider income from international students, to be reinvested into the higher education and skills system. Further details will be set out in the Autumn Budget.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/restoring-control...
> it is right that these benefits are shared
It already is! The current system mandates that universities provide a whole range of degrees to British students below cost. One of the few ways they have to do that is charging high fees to international students. If they don't want this happening they could a) increase the cap on tuition fees or b) fund the gap themselves. Taxing the income that makes this subsidy work is just going to make things work as either the system moves closer to collapse or universities become even less discriminate in accepting international students.
(Though, also, some of those degrees are a lot cheaper than others despite featuring the same tuition cap. If you go to university to study most humanities or mathematics, then you're also subsidizing the engineering, science, and especially medical degrees)
The cost also depends on the universities and how they teach.
Teaching cheaper subjects at Oxbridge and other universities with a tutorial system is a lot more expensive than doing the same at a degree mill.
My daughter is doing a middle cost subject (archaeology and anthropology) at Oxford and I think £10k/year fees are great value for the degree.
The government here seems annoying about people coming here on a student visa and then transferring onto another kind of visa after studying. Isn't this the point? Dont we want to keep the people we just educated to become positive members of society? No matter your personal feelings around immigration policy, arent these the exact immigrants that wed want?
Yeah, as I understand it, student visas have one of the biggest GDP multipliers of any visa type (second only to the Tier 1 Investor). It's reckoned that the window allowing you to stay on after graduation for long enough to find a good job on a subsequent employment visa is a large part of that.
Unfortunately, it's also one of the easiest types to fiddle with when people start screaming about immigrants / the evils of student housing / etc - prospective overseas students don't have nearly as many people willing to speak up for them as people with employment offers or who have family members already in the UK.
Hence this scheme intended to reduce the supply of places, the 'visa brake' under Starmer, and all the wild variations in policy under the previous Tory governments. We've not really been able to find any sort of happy medium since Brexit, and in the meantime - as you rightly point out in some of your other comments - it's the universities that are being harmed.
We were not able to find a happy medium before Brexit either.
One of the problems is that a lot of people do not realise just how much money overseas students pay and the extent to which they subsidise home students.
International students have caused a lot of weird effects in uk universities, from people being "encouraged" ti not fail them to keep the income, to required grades being higher for local students, which is a problem in subjects where there is a limited intake, to accommodation pricing jumps, and providers targeting foreign students, meaning less choice for local students. The income has also covered up a lot of the defunding of education by the government.
I think there have been a lot of unanticipated secondary effects with the sector encouraging so many.
> meaning less choice for local students
A consequence of the government's attempt to make universities 'self-fund' the discount for local students.
> The income has also covered up a lot of the defunding of education by the government
Well yeah, that was the point. The solution would probably involve increasing the university's income from the government, though, not decreasing it.
>to required grades being higher for local students, which is a problem in subjects where there is a limited intake
I saw many courses in Clearing listed as being only for foreign students.
Just change the title to "Foreign student fees in the UK to increase by $1500" (The universities will of course have to charge a little bit extra for the new admin work).
The article reports it in an odd way, making it sound like it singles out students from Nigeria, Kenya, India and Pakistan. The fee applies to any student who pays international tuition rates.
Wow, it is remarkable that the UK government is imposing a USD-denominated charge on its universities.
It should be $500,000. Is absolutely insane that a society would sell out and betray not just its own people, its own children, but its own whole society and culture by giving away the immense value of their education, the accumulated knowledge of centuries for free, something that is not even morally or ethically theirs to give away for free. It is essentially a criminal theft and malfeasance, treason.
That applies in any country, for any society, any culture. It is effectively your own parents betraying you to advantage, advance, and favor the children of others. It is such a deep betrayal, overt treason! A healthy society would punish this kind of craven betrayal in the most extreme way.
Only if you believe that knowledge is zero sum.
[deleted]