UK to charge universities $1,200 per international student

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.

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.

I bet these foreign students are not profiting from your housing crisis, they're probably victims too. You should look further up, follow the money.

> The government handed universities free reign to hand out as many visa as they liked, and they handed out millions.

The government defines the terms for and issues student visas, not universities. Students have to apply for a visa themselves and there are distinct substantive requirements for being granted one, including having a study place, being a genuine student, having sufficient financial resources to support yourself etc. The government (through DIBP), not the universities, make the final call on whether a student visa is granted. Many visa applications are rejected. See Section 3 of https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-stats/files/stud... , which was in 2023 before the recent migration policy tightenings, where the outside-Australian grant rate for eg India is less than 70%.

> 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.

As other commenters have pointed out, there is a cap on permanent residency visas issued for reasons other than family reunification and that cap is substantially lower than the number of temporary visas issued. Any international student graduate would need to compete for a permanent residency visa by way of obtaining enough points for an invitation to apply through one of the permanent residency streams. These typically require a high level of education, local work experience, stable and permanent income amongst other things. The current estimates are that around 40% of international students obtain permanent residency within 10 years of graduation, so the majority of international student graduates either leave Australia or "hop" between temporary visas (which the government has for some time put mechanisms in place to prevent).

> Absolutely out of control population growth.

12 month rolling average of population growth has been steady at around 1.5% for the past 10 years, with the brief exceptions of the COVID period where it was negative and 2023, where it was 2.5% , largely due to the fact that many people who had delayed migration plans during the COVID years now actually acted on them and short term population growth rates due to migration around the world were also at high levels. Those levels have now largely mean reverted, partly due to policy, partly due to there no longer being a backlog of demand and partly due to economic circumstances which have reduced the incentive to migrate.

> Growth - through population growth, through "international students" - governments absolutely love it because it hides their bad economic management,

There is no evidence to suggest that population growth is an intended policy to "hide" bad economic management. Increasing immigration was the only responsible thing to do in 2022 and 2023 because the number of working age adults had shrunk and the excess of demand during those years after effectively zero or negative interest rates meant that there was a need to fill that demand with new workforce. Part of that comes from persons who start out studying and move into employment.

> And the government has staunchly - ridiculously - stated for years that international students do not impact housing. Yeah right - they don't live anywhere.

International students are barely competing for the same housing stock as long-term residents or citizens. International students typically live in rental shared accommodation, not in the detached homes for sale that your average Australian would be aiming for. Of course, international students have to live somewhere your comments overstates the impact that this actually has on the housing market.

> And they don't invest in the infrastructure to support the millions of people added to the population

Governments are investing in "the infrastructure". Billions are spent on further developing public transportation systems, roads etc according to established city plans.

> 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.

On the contrary to "more people coming" - Immigration has slowed down significantly in almost every developed country. In future years, it is likely that Australia will struggle to meet its targets for economic based immigration because the age cohorts in the sending countries are getting proportionately smaller and there is also less demand to migrate in general.

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.

2. Build more _affordable_ housing stock.

Doesn't seem like that hard.

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).

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.)

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.

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).

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.

I saw many courses in Clearing listed as being only for foreign students.

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)