Bradley Perrett | Education and migration systems must be better managed.

Actually, it should be a front door.

The hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates produced by our universities and other tertiary schools each year are an excellent pool from which to choose immigrants. They're mostly young and should be well educated, so we can expect them to be good taxpayers for decades before they begin to draw on government support.

But we need rules that properly manage that door, because not every international student will be a winner in our labour market. It turns out that we're managing the door very badly.

The problem is that so many international students who have finished their courses are staying in Australia on temporary graduate visas, which we offer to give them time to find jobs. Eight years ago, about 30,000 people were on such visas; now 200,000 are.

The evidence of policy failure is right there in those numbers: too many people who supposedly have good qualifications are not promptly getting work that would move them on towards permanent residency and maybe Australian citizenship. Instead, they're lingering on the overly long and overly extendable temporary visas while they look for other paths to permanency.

Researchers at Grattan Institute, a think tank, predict that by 2030 current policies will result in 370,000 people being on temporary graduate visas - over 1 per cent of the population.

In a report issued this week, they recommend changes. They say we should remove some barriers that students face in getting good jobs but generally reduce the time for them to do so, mostly to two years, which still should be enough. Then, if they cannot find work that pays well, we should tell them it's time to go home.

If that sounds tough, consider the people whom we almost never think about when deciding that someone can stay: those who are still overseas and would like to come here. Whether our immigration program is large or small, it's always limited, so when we say "yes" to one person we're saying "no" to someone else.

The person who gets a "no" might have been able to earn a high salary here, pay lots of tax and, through his or her skills, create better work opportunities for Australians.

We get no such benefits from an international graduate who, for example, has a low-quality master's degree in business, has found that employers aren't interested in it and is instead working in a convenience store - a respectable job, to be sure, but not one we need to fill with a graduate.

Indeed, we may be kinder if we made it clear at the outset that people won't be able to linger for years with no prospect of staying in Australia permanently, says Trent Wiltshire, who wrote the Grattan Institute report with colleagues Brendan Coates and Tyler Reysenbach.

Past changes to visa rules are partly responsible for the situation. In 2013 we created the temporary graduate visa to make Australian education more attractive in the international market. More recently, we've further extended the rights of international graduates to stay, helping immigration to catch up from the hit it suffered in the pandemic.

Another factor has been a change in the mix of students' countries of origin.

Over the past decade we've had a welcome boom in students from the subcontinent, particularly India and Nepal. Average income in India is only a fifth of the level in China, our other main source of foreign students. So an Indian graduate is much more likely than a Chinese one to persevere here in the hope of eventually gaining citizenship rather than returning home to develop a career there.

If an international student finds that a first course has failed to deliver a good job, one answer is to do another. For those who have followed up a coursework master's degree with further studies, an astounding two-thirds have chosen a vocational course - for example, at a technical college.

There must be something bizarrely wrong in a system in which people waste time and money on pointless masters' degrees before going on to get a skill in something of undoubted value, such as cooking or carpentry.

(The statistic would include only a few people who need a particular tech qualification, such as workplace safety, as a vocational supplement to their master's degrees.)

That brings us to another reason for so many international students failing to get work: the evident low value of the education peddled by some of our universities. The unis are quite responsible for the quality of their output, graduates' employability, because they chose the input material - the students - and did the value-adding - the teaching. So what are they doing wrong?

A valuable suggestion from the researchers is for the government to publish regular reports on the employment achievements of students for each course. Junk education would soon be exposed and shunned.

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One last point, not in the report, is that we clearly should adjust policy to encourage more international students to choose technical training at the outset. Only 32 per cent of foreigners' enrolments here are in such courses.

We have enough of a problem with too many young Australians insisting on going for Bachelor's Degrees in Useless Studies instead of getting technical qualifications for which there is screaming market demand.

Well, let the silly Aussies stick with university prestige while we bring in immigrants who can learn to fix cars, care for the elderly, inspect lifts, renovate kitchens - and more reliably earn a quid.