Student visa applications for Australia from India down 63 per cent

Melbourne: Australia's offshore international student visa applications from India have registered have a drop of almost 63 per cent in the last financial year, according to latest official data. Overall, offshore student visa applications from around the world have registered a drop of 20 per cent for the same period, reports said Wednesday, with the Indian market being the hardest hit.

The Immigration Department's quarterly report on the student visa programme ending June revealed that the number of offshore applicants from India dropped from 18,514 in the 2009-10 financial year to just 6875 in the 2010-11 financial year.

India aside, even applications from China, Australia's largest market for international students, also dropped 24.3 per cent.

According to Melbourne University higher education expert Simon Marginson, the steep drop-off in offshore applications was largely because of federal government changes to the visa criteria and skilled migration list.

"Demand for Australian education in India always was relatively soft and the elimination of the migration-related industry run through education agents, plus the image problems triggered by the violence, has permanently depressed the prospects of recruitment in that country," he said.

Professor Marginson said the drop in applications from Vietnam - down 31 per cent - and China was of greater concern.

"China and south-east Asia are our core markets [and] far more worrying is the defection of part of the student market in China and Vietnam, where demand is more education-centred, and the quality of students coming to Australia has been higher than those coming from India," he said.