Do international graduates still get Australian permanent residency?

If you are asking whether an international student graduating in Australia today is less likely to eventually get permanent residency (PR) than someone who graduated 10 or 20 years ago, there is no like-for-like percentage that settles it. One post-study pathway has become markedly less likely to lead to PR by the time a graduate visa expires, but that does not mean graduates’ ultimate chance of gaining PR has been cut in half.4

What the available figures measure

Group and time frame	Share gaining PR	What it tells us
Student visa holders in the late 2000s, measured within six years of starting study	Up to about 25% moved to a permanent visa.1	This includes students beyond university graduates.
International students who began studying in the early 2010s, measured over 10 years	An estimated 35–40% gained PR, according to Jobs and Skills Australia. The study examined cohorts from 2010–11 onward and tracked their outcomes to the end of 2023.614	This includes higher education, vocational education and other student visa types—not just people who completed a university degree.
Temporary Graduate visa holders, measured when their visas expired	About two-thirds transitioned to PR in 2014, compared with less than one-third in the comparison reported in 2023.4	This concerns people on a particular post-study visa at a particular point, not everyone who studied in Australia or their eventual outcomes.

The first two rows cannot be read as a rise from 25% to 35–40%: they follow different groups for different lengths of time.16 Likewise, the fall in the graduate-visa figure is real for that measure, but it does not establish that today’s graduates are half as likely to obtain PR at some point in their lives.4

Jobs and Skills Australia also estimated a likely decline to around 25–30% gaining PR for students who started in the late 2010s. That is an estimate for a later starting cohort, not a measured lifetime success rate for people graduating now.6

You may also see a 16% figure cited by Universities Australia in 2023. For the question of longer-term outcomes, the later government study’s 35–40% estimate is more directly relevant—but it still does not predict an individual graduate’s prospects today.56

What about citizenship?

The figures above concern permanent residency, not Australian citizenship. The available evidence does not provide a reliable, comparable percentage of international university graduates who eventually become citizens now versus 10 or 20 years ago. Nor are these figures PR application approval rates: a student who did not gain PR should not automatically be counted as someone whose application was rejected.