The more I read this article, the less I'm convinced... Another "odd" bit (imo).

> This brings me onto Australia’s third largest export which is $22 billion in “education-related travel services”. Ask the average person in the street, and they would have no idea what that is and, at least in some part, it is an $18.8 billion dollar immigration industry dressed up as “education”.

> While some of these students are studying technical degrees that are vitally needed to power the future of the economy, a cynic would say that the majority of this program is designed as a crutch to prop up housing prices and government revenue from taxation in a flagging economy. After all, it doesn’t look that hard to borrow 90% of a property’s value from Australian lenders on a 457 visa.

A 457 visa doesn't have anything to do with a student visa... This comment feels like intentional misdirection, because those two things are not at all related. (A 457 visa is a skilled worker visa - although as with all skilled work visas, it has got it's own controversy and, as the article points out (in an underhanded way I would say, again...), until recently had some very odd "skills" (and probably still does...))

> How much the banks will be left to carry when the market turns and these students flee the burden of negative equity is anyone’s guess.

AFAIK, if you're a temporary resident in Australia getting a 90% loan (and even if you're not a temporary resident in some (many?) cases) there's a requirement to get Lenders Mortgage Insurance. So... The insurer will be left to carry said burden, not the bank? Unless my understanding of LMIs is off. And again, they're not a student if they're on a 457 visa, so this is all a bit inaccurate anyway...

Back to the "education-related travel services" side of that quoting, friends of mine work in the Higher Education industry and it actually is huge business for them getting international students. And their respective organisations make a lot of money from it. (And it's not just higher education, even schools in Australia make a lot of money from international students.)

And, in my opinion more importantly, this is an export industry, so it doesn't matter that only "some of these students are studying technical degrees that are vitally needed to power the future of the economy". It's not about those degrees being vitally important to Australia's economy, because it's an export... (And the underhanded nature of that line is a bit much for me...)

> You now know what all these tinpot “english”, “IT” and “business colleges” that have popped up downtown are about. They’re not about providing quality education, they are about gaming the immigration system.

Sure, I mean, I don't know how technically accurate this statement is so taking it at face value, just because there are some dodgy education providers, the whole 18 billion dollar industry is now denigrated to an "immigration industry"? Apparently there are 6 Australian Universities in the top 100 worldwide [0], but no, the whole show is actually _mostly_ just an "immigration industry"?

("Ask the average person in the street, and they would have no idea what that is" - a huge number of my friends know that the Australian economy makes a heap of money from foreign students studying here, maybe they don't know it's the third biggest export, but still... Again with the underhanded language...)

This article is quite grating...

[0]: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...