Universities must take a stand on visa fees and refusals

In March this year, Australia refused nearly 4,800 higher education visa applications lodged from overseas. Almost every one of those applicants had paid a non-refundable AU$2,000 (US$1390) charge. That single month of refusals put close to AU$10 million into the federal budget. The charge has since risen to AU$2,500.

In mid-2024 the Australian student visa cost AU$710. Two years and three increases later, it has more than tripled, while the refusal rate has climbed to 24.2%, the highest in a decade. More than half of applicants from Nepal were refused in the last financial year, and more than four in 10 from India.

Student visa fees brought in around AU$735 million in 2025, up from AU$244 million in 2018. By one analysis cited in an education publication, that now exceeds the annual budget of the national statistics office.

Australia is the clearest case, but not the only one. The United States refused 35% of F-1 visa applications in 2025, a decade high, with rates above 60% for India and across much of Africa. Canada approved just 36% of new post-secondary study permit applications in 2025. Across all three, the odds of a positive answer have fallen sharply, and in Australia the price of asking has risen with them.

Just one part of the application cost

The problem is not that governments charge for processing. It is that the charge has stopped bearing any relationship to the decision.

Two years ago the same assessment cost AU$710. A fee of AU$2,500, collected from every applicant regardless of outcome and set at a moment when a quarter of applicants are being turned away, is something else. It is revenue, and a growing share of it comes from the refused applicant, who pays in full and receives nothing.

The visa charge is also only the part that shows up in government accounts. Before an application can be lodged, a student has usually paid for an English test, a medical examination, biometrics, health insurance and often a tuition fee deposit.

The government charges are never refunded. The insurance and the deposit usually are, but only after the student chases them. For a family in Kathmandu or Lagos, the sunk cost of one refusal can approach several months of income, and it arrives with a templated letter and, for offshore applicants, no right of appeal.

Why universities should speak out

Universities did not design this system, and neither did the recruitment platforms, ours included, that help students navigate it. But both sit inside it, both benefit from the applicants who get through, and both have been remarkably quiet about the ones who do not. Four things are within universities’ power, and platforms like ours should hold themselves to the first two.

• Tell the truth before the money is spent: Every institution knows its own grant rate by source country; the numbers come back with each intake. Very few publish them. An offer letter to a Nepali applicant that carries no indication that half of such applications are currently refused is not neutral. It invites a family to spend money against odds the university can see and the family cannot. Publishing grant rates by market, and building them into the counselling conversation, would cost nothing.

• Sequence the costs: Much of what a student pays is pulled forward by institutional process rather than by visa rules: deposits requested before enrolment confirmation is issued, insurance bought a year ahead, medicals booked before an interview exists. Universities can move their own demands to the latest possible point in the chain, and can make deposit refunds on refusal automatic rather than something a student has to apply for with a rejection letter in hand.

• Stop treating refusals as a cost of doing business: Institutions model conversion. They know what a 40 percent refusal rate does to a pipeline. What the sector has not said, publicly, is that the applicants filling the gap are also the ones funding the border. Advocacy groups and associations have lobbied hard on caps and on fee increases, but almost entirely on grounds of competitiveness. The stronger argument is fairness, and it is universities, not governments, who have the standing to make it.

• Put a concrete alternative on the table: A two-part charge, with a modest processing component paid when an application is lodged and the balance payable only on grant, would keep government revenue from every student who actually arrives while removing any perception that refusals pay. Both halves of the idea already exist.

The United States collects its new US$250 visa integrity fee only once a visa is approved, and the UK refunds its health surcharge when a visa is refused, conceding the principle that money paid for a benefit not received should go back. Extending that principle to the application fee is a policy ask, and the sector should own it.

None of this will lower refusal rates. Governments will set those for their own reasons. What it does is close the distance between what a university tells an applicant and what it knows, and it takes the sector out of the position of profiting, quietly, from a system it did not build and would not defend in public.

Sanjay Laul is the founder of MSM Unify, a global education marketplace connecting students, recruitment partners and institutions on one platform, with access to more than 1,500 partner institutions across 21 countries. The platform combines technology and trusted guidance to simplify student recruitment and applications, and gives institutions diversified recruitment through verified applications, transparent processes and market intelligence.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.