Universities want federal help for housing stress

Universities have called on the federal government to extend its program encouraging public-private investment in affordable rental accommodation into the higher education sector to boost the safety and academic engagement of foreign students.
 
In its submission to a Senate inquiry into international students, the Australian Technology Network (ATN) of universities says that students are in a state of "housing stress", facing high rents and few vacancies in major cities. This was a major issue because finding and accessing suitable accommodation was a "critical success factor" in international students' experience, the group says.
 
"Some Australian inner-city suburbs are citing [rental] vacancy rates at 1.1 per cent, forcing international students ever wider in the search for accommodation, often to locations of questionable safety," the submission says.
 
To deal with this issue, the ATN wants the government to extend the National Rental Affordability Scheme to the higher education sector.
 
The federal government's National Rental Affordability Scheme is seeking to build 50,000 new rental properties across Australia by 2012. Such properties will be rented out at 20 per cent below market rate.
 
In its submission to the inquiry, the Group of Eight, which represents the nation's research-intensive universities, says the minimum income levels international students have access to should be "revised upwards" to better reflect the actual cost of studying in Australia.
 
The submission says the Department of Immigration and Citizenship's current requirement that students have access to $12,000 a year leads to "confusion and erroneous assumptions" about what it costs to live in Australia.
 
The president of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA), Nigel Palmer, said universities needed to pay attention to their academic duty of care to international students, plus their responsibilities for students' safety.
 
"With the notion of an academic duty of care, universities should only be taking on students that they are confident have the ability to complete the course and to support them properly through the course of their degree," he said.
 
In their submissions, CAPA and the Group of Eight have also pushed for public transport concessions to be extended to all international students.
 
The Senate inquiry into the welfare of international students will report on November 16.