The number of international students in Australia has expanded rapidly over the past three decades, in line with a trend towards global expansion in the number of globally mobile postsecondary students: there were more than 5.3 million people studying for a tertiary qualification outside of their home country as of 2017 (UNESCO, 2021). Australia has benefitted from this migratory flow, having developed a highly lucrative higher education export industry. In 2021, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, there were 570,626 students enrolled in Australian tertiary institutions, making it the fourth most popular destination country for globally mobile students.

In this paper, based on data from a mixed-methods study, first, we seek to understand how levels of financial precarity vary within this group, responding to calls to reverse the socioeconomic homogenization of the international student migrant in existing academic work (e.g. Lipura & Collins, 2020; Raghuram et al., 2020). Secondly, we explore the ways in which financial precarity seeps into the ‘intimate spheres’ of international students’ lives. In doing so, we aim to centre and refine ‘precarity’ as a conceptual framing for the study of international student mobility. As such, although this study is focused on the Australian context, we seek to discuss the wider implications of increased precarity among international students globally, including in Europe. We posit the use of precarity as a bridge or ‘relational nexus’ (Neilson, 2019), anchored in structural conditions but connecting these to the broader lived experiences of students, focusing on time poverty, social isolation, and negative impacts on physical and mental wellbeing, as facets of precariousness understood as ‘a socioontological dimension of lives and bodies’ (Lorey, 2015, p.11). In sum, rather than defining precarity exclusively as an economic condition, we propose that it is useful to explore the connections between financial precarity and precarious life (Strauss & McGrath, 2018).

The precarity and precariousness of international student migrants remains underexplored. They are generally framed as a relatively homogenous group, through consumption-based metaphors, as privileged members of the nascent ‘global middle class(es)’ (Robertson, 2015). This is reflected in the fact that a significant portion of the empirical research on internationally mobile students has been concerned with the ways in which this form of migration is employed as a means of middle-class social reproduction. As a result, research in this area, especially that focused on major destinations in the Global North, has only rarely acknowledged the full diversity of socio-economic backgrounds within this group. However, there is increasing recognition of a critical need to acknowledge the vulnerability and precarity faced by many international students, progressing beyond the aforementioned ‘flattening’ of the socio-economic dimensions of international student mobility (Lipura & Collins, 2020; Raghuram et al., 2020). The findings that we present in this paper contribute to understandings of precarity among international student migrants by highlighting the high level of variation between this group.

Survey respondents are divided into four groups of financial deprivation, according to results from a baseline survey which collected information on financial stress indicators – none, moderate, high, and extreme. This enables an exploration of the ways in which economic insecurity, and other facets of broader lived experience – wellbeing, free time, and relationships – interact with each other and shape migrants’ experiences differentially along lines of financial vulnerability.

The data used in this paper was collected as part of a mixed methods project focused on housing precarity among international students in Australia’s private rental sector. In this paper, we draw on an initial survey conducted between August and December 2019 in Sydney and Melbourne, and semi-structured interviews conducted with 48 international students. The survey focused on students’ experiences of the private rental sector, and also included items related to student wellbeing, social capital, and a range of indicators of financial stress. Central to this article is an understanding of students experiences of varying levels of financial stress in Australia, a country ranked as among the most expensive to live in for international students. A modified version of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) financial stress questionnaire was employed in order to capture levels of financial stress experienced by students within the sample. The survey was sent to all students across 43 tertiary education institutions, and received 7,084 valid responses from international students at 10 universities, 24 vocational education providers, 7 English Language Colleges and 2 foundation colleges in the two fieldwork sites. The survey was available in either English or Mandarin Chinese in order to ensure a high response rate among the Chinese students, as China represented the largest source of international students in Australia at the time the survey was conducted.This data is supplemented by insights from 48 in-depth semi-structured interviews. The interviews covered a wide range of themes including friendship and social ties, loneliness, paid employment, financial stress, finding accommodation, housing insecurity and housing quality. They were conducted via Zoom, as they were undertaken during the pandemic when face-to-face meetings were not possible. A shortlist of 120 contacts who indicated willingness to be interviewed was developed based on the composite precarity score, with an aim of selecting students with varying experiences of precarity. The interviews were analysed through both deductive and inductive coding, using NVivo qualitative data analysis software.

We seek to make two key points. First, the data presented contributes to a fuller recognition of the socio-economic dimensions of international student mobility, and thus to a contesting of the (still) prevailing framing of the international student migrant as a privileged, discerning, consumer of a service export. In effect, we demonstrate that there exists a significant hierarchy of privilege and risk among international students in Australia. This has relevance to all major international student destination countries, including those in Europe. Second, we seek to move beyond the discussion of precarity in the economic domain among international students in Australia by employing the concept of precarity as a ‘relational nexus’ that links ‘questions of political economy to matters of culture, subjectivity, and experience’ (Neilson, 2019, p. 571). We found that the students experiencing greater levels of financial precarity were more likely to express anxiety that the number of hours they need to work would impact their academic performance. These students were also more likely to go without necessities such as food and to have difficulty making close friends. The interviews highlight a number of mechanisms through which financial precarity shapes these facets of broader wellbeing, and through which these facets of personal precariousness may become mutually reinforcing. For example, we emphasise how the need to work, and housing affordability stress contribute to time poverty, anxiety, and difficulties developing close friendships among the most precarious students. Further to this, we explored the ways in which these forms of precarity create a vicious circle wherein, as an example, a lack of free time may negatively impact wellbeing, which in turn may exacerbate financial precarity.

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