Access to higher education in Australia has been made easier for overseas students from ‘high-risk’ countries like India, Pakistan and China with the removal of stringent grant criteria for students enrolled in selected education institutions.

Confident that it has broken the nexus between education visas and permanent visas, the coalition has relaxed the rules for the grant of student visas to ‘high-risk’ countries.

A total of 60 education providers are now on the list for fast-tracked and low-doc student visas. In essence, students – regardless of their country of origin – who are enrolled with these education providers for higher education courses, will be considered low risk. These students hence will need to provided less information to DIBP and are expected to receive simpler and quicker visa processing. Perhaps most significantly, under the new arrangements, they are expected to show about $20,000 less in available funds in order to be granted a visa.

The changes which were flagged late last year, came into effect on 22 March 2014. Minister Scott Morrison said that he is confident that the Coalition has broken the nexus between education visas and permanent visas. “We are in the business of having a world leading international education sector in this country, not selling visas. Those reforms that have broken that nexus are important…” he said speaking at the CPD Immigration Law Conference, Sydney.

The eligible education providers for SVP for sc 573, sc 574 and sc575 now include 41 Universities and 19 non-universities.  Non-university education providers on the list are starting to see increased enrolments. One such provider, Navita’s recently reported a 6 per cent increase in enrolments to 18,862 students this year. "This solid result was driven by a more than 25 per cent increase in recruitment of international students from their source countries… Vietnam, India, Nepal and Pakistan." the company said in a statement. The listed company’s share price  on the ASX surged over 15% since the beginning of the year on news of increased enrolments and strong future prospects.