Carrington Clarke

I'm going to start with one of the issues that I thought was most interesting to me because it seemed to fly in the face of the accepted kind of orthodoxy, which is there doesn't seem to be a strong link between migrants studying at Australian universities

and how well they do in the labour market.

It doesn't seem to indicate that they're actually going to earn more money when they work within Australia if they came here to study first.

Can you talk us through that?

It does seem to fly in the face of what I think most people would have expected.

And I think one of the strong arguments from the higher education industry, right?

They keep talking about it's our third biggest export earner with a huge amount of money is being plowed into Australian universities by foreign students studying there.

And your research looks at just that pathway from coming over on a student visa and then getting a different type of visa to work within Australia.

And yet it appears that those people who've come through Australian universities aren't doing as well in the workforce as, say, bringing someone over on a skilled visa to start off with if they've studied overseas.

So how can we understand this?

Because

As you say, you would think if you've come here, you've studied in an Australian university.

We have good universities, world-class universities.

They've spent time within the Australian environment.

They've learned some of those cultural norms, et cetera.

Why are they doing worse?

So let's talk through that, the points system when it comes to getting a working visa in Australia.

You talk about you get extra points for going to a regional area by doing English tests.

How problematic is that system?

And the design of the points system was supposed to kind of have a system in place that helped us get the migrants that were most likely to do well, right?