International students flock to Australian universities. Here is what they study

Luis Guzman grew up with Australia in his sights.

After watching the film Kangaroo Jack as a six-year-old in Guatemala, he told his mother the country would one day be his home. At 18 he came down under to travel. At 28 he enrolled in a master’s degree in event management at the UTS Business School.

Now in his final semester, Guzman has high hopes for the future. He dreams of working in Formula 1 racing, and meanwhile is developing his entrepreneurship skills.

He hopes to stay in Australia after graduating. The opportunities, he says, are unparallelled.

“I know that in Australia, if I work hard and I put effort in, I can achieve more.”

Guzman is one of hundreds of thousands of international students who come to Australian universities to pursue their dreams.

Since 2021, international student enrolments at Australian universities increased by 46.2 per cent – from 314,619 to 460,090.

Those numbers have been a primary target of the federal government’s plans, revealed on Thursday, to curb net migration from about 300,000 to 225,000 next year. It aims to curb the number of international students by targeting visa hopping and by reducing the influx of family members.

The most popular broad field of study for international students enrolled in Australian universities was management and commerce, accounting for 120,136 enrolments in 2026. Information technology ranked second, followed by society and culture.

The most studied management and commerce disciplines were business and management (61,222 enrolments), followed by accounting (14,566 enrolments).

Speaking before the migration changes were unveiled, International Education Association of Australia chief executive Phil Honeywood said those degrees had broad appeal to international neighbours, offering in-demand skills taught in a native English setting.

“The overwhelming number of overseas students doing such courses come from family businesses where the parents would like their child to learn business practices in a native English-speaking country, and … go home to run the family business or to start in a larger corporation.”

Honeywood said on Thursday the reforms were “really a mixed bag” for international students but the changes were unlikely to impact the types of degrees that were most popular.

Guzman, who hopes to remain in Australia after his degree, says the variety of skills taught in business degrees made them desirable for domestic and international students.

“People just want to gain … skills for management and skills for HR and skills for marketing,” he says. “You have more options whenever you’re looking for a job.”

Guzman understood the need for the government to balance immigration with domestic matters but he was worried such reforms would affect perceptions of international students.

“If I talk with my friends who are international students, I think they are going to feel anxious about their futures,” he said.

While management and commerce has maintained its position as the most-studied field by international students over the past five years, its contribution to enrolments dropped by 21.5 per cent.

Honeywood says this coincides with the removal of finance and accounting from the Australian government’s skills-in-demand list. He warns that maintaining international access to these degrees is key to Australia’s soft power diplomacy in the region, as many neighbouring countries have relied on Australia for its educational experts for decades.

There has also been an uptick in international enrolments in other fields.

In the past five years, enrolments in broad education degrees shot up 297.7 per cent – from 12,026 students in 2021 to 47,824 in 2026.

Teacher education increased from the ninth-most-popular ‘narrow field of study’ in 2021 to the second in 2026. This discipline encompasses early childhood, secondary education and teaching English as a second language.

The most-studied teaching degree in 2026 is early childhood, making up 36.9 per cent of international enrolments. The biggest increase for a specific teaching degree in the past five years was in vocational education and training, which increased from 159 students in 2021 to 4047 in 2026.

Honeywood says a portion of this increase is driven by education degrees being classified as a skill in demand by the Australian government, making postgraduate education diplomas a migration pathway.

“We all live in hope that teaching vacancies and childcare and other skills supply shortages will be met.

“There’s a dichotomy between, on the one hand, skills in demand that Australia needs, and the motivation of some overseas students as to why they’re actually enrolling in that course.

“We’re heavily reliant as a nation on overseas students who’ll be our future childcare workers and, indeed, our future aged care workers,” Honeywood says.

As international student enrolments fluctuate, Honeywood says there is “no secret recipe for the right proportion” of international to domestic students.

“It’s a very powerful opportunity … to have this diversity of people and cultures.”

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.