News
Dedicated visa for graduates
Australia's premier universities have backed a plan to create a new Australian visa which would allow post-graduate students a three-year temporary visa and a route to permanent residency.
The call from the academic community is timely, as the Australian Federal Government is currently in the process of reviewing its skills-based points system for Aussie immigration – with changes to the list of skills shortages expected to come into effect later this year.
The motivation behind the universities' idea is to retain more of the high calibre students graduating from Aussie colleges.
The basis of the submission from Australia's top eight higher education institutions to the Australian Government is that international students completing a Masters or PhD in Australia should be provided with a temporary work visa for three years upon completion. The Group of Eight go on to urge policy makers to create a clear pathway to permanent residency Down Under through any new graduate visa.
The new visa has been suggested as a way for Australia to attract high-calibre international students to study in the country, and then allow them to remain there after graduation and make a positive contribution to Australian society.
According to Max King from Monash University, the Australian government is "concerned about the number of graduates we have from PhDs in particular and [they] are looking at ways to solve a problem we can see coming, that we won't have enough researchers in the future unless we do something about it now."
If the academics get their way then a new visa may soon be available to anyone clever enough to qualify.
06 July 2010