Two weeks ago, Mingwei Yin, 19, said goodbye to her parents in her home city of Chongqing, in south-west China, and made the long journey to Melbourne and her new student life.

It was the realisation of a dream that had been put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic for the past year. Arriving at the University of Melbourne, the first thing she did was to pick up her student ID – it was a proud moment. Since then, life has been a whirl – finding somewhere to live, getting over jetlag and culture shock, and exploring the sprawling campus.

Waiting in a long queue with her high school friend for bubble tea on campus during “O” week, she told The Citizen she was thrilled to finally be here and starting her studies, after delaying them a year rather than studying by zoom.

Yin is one of over 104,000 international students now flying into Melbourne after three years of COVID-19 disruption. The city is pulsing with an energy – and an economy – that’s been missing since the pandemic closed borders. The City of Melbourne is now determined not only to welcome them back, but to encourage many more of them to make this their destination of choice. But that involves overcoming some very unwelcome hurdles.

The first is finding somewhere to live. Yin was lucky to locate student accommodation she’s happy with through her network of friends, but many students are struggling to find a place to call home.

“It’s so hard to rent apartments,” says Maggie Xu, who arrived in Melbourne a month ago and had no luck finding a studio apartment, which was her first choice. Instead, she’s had to take university accommodation, which is much smaller and more expensive than a private rental.

Melbourne was already in the grip of a rental crisis, with a rental vacancy rate falling to 1.2 per cent early this year, and the student influx has added to the pressure. Sarah Owens, from Ireland, has hit the same wall.

“Ninety-nine per cent of houses here are occupied,” she says.

She sent 50 texts to an online rental group and made numerous calls and virtual inspections before securing a studio that “isn’t perfect, but the location is great”.

“We recognise the absolutely pivotal role that accommodation has in that student experience,” says Councillor Davydd Griffiths, who is the City of Melbourne’s portfolio lead for education.  He also recognises that at present, the rental crisis is a big problem for students, and is exploring strategies to try to relieve the pressure.

The council is presently considering submissions from two student representative groups – the Student Accommodation Council and the International Education Association of Australia. Meanwhile, there has been some progress on the accommodation front. “It was good to see more purposed built student accommodation had come online recently,” Griffiths says.

Helping students navigate accommodation and employment hurdles needed to be a priority for the City of Melbourne if it was going to improve its credentials as a destination of choice, Griffiths told a recent city council meeting. Before the pandemic, Melbourne was ranked in the world’s top three best cities for students, but it has now slid to fifth place.

Melbourne is still the most popular choice for international students within Australia, but his ambition is to see it become world’s hottest destination. The city has partnered with the Victorian Government on the state’s $52.9 million International Student Recovery Plan 2025, launched in September last year. Improving the student experience is listed as the top priority of the plan.

“International students are the very best ambassadors that we could have for our city and our country,” Griffiths says.

“We want students to have all of the positive experiences and we’re there to help if they do have negative experiences.”

Employment is the next big hurdle students face. While labour force statistics presently indicate a healthy jobs market, many international students are locked out of it.

The employment rate for international graduates in 2021 was lower than for domestic graduates, according to a survey funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment. For undergraduates, only 43.0% of international graduates secured full-time employment compared to a much higher 68.9% of domestic graduates. Postgraduate coursework had a 41.0% gap between full-time employment of international and domestic students.

“No matter when you apply for a part-time job or casual job, the local students are their priorities,” says Helena Zhang, a PhD candidate who has been studying and working in Melbourne for eight years.

Yukie Wu, who graduated with Master of Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne last year, dreams of making a living as a writer. But for now, she’s willing to work anywhere, anytime. She’s been spending most days online at the State Library – she’s just moved out of student accommodation into a studio with no internet – searching for jobs. She’s applied for numerous positions, but very few employers even responded.

When The Citizen spoke to Wu at this week’s graduate careers fair at the University of Melbourne, she pointed out that of the 40-plus company booths on display, only 18 indicated they would hire international students.

This illustrates a key problem, says Griffiths. “Not all employers understand that they can employ international students or international graduates.” The state government’s student recovery plan identifies a disconnect between skills shortages across a range of sectors, and failures by many employers to tap into the pool of high-calibre talent in the international student community. Mostly this is blamed on standardised recruitment practices and perceived barriers in signing up students on visas.

“We have been talking to people about just changing some of the points [on jobs applications] – we don’t actually need a box that says ‘are you an Australian citizen’,” says Griffiths. Last week, the Federal Government announced a two-year extension of post-study work rights for international higher education graduates with eligible qualifications.

Talking to international students, the other festering issue is racism. Students talk about feeling unwelcome, and even unsafe. Some of this is the lingering effect of the pandemic, which fuelled racial discrimination, as has been widely documented, spreading from attacks on the Chinese community to hit Asian communities more widely.

According to a 2020 survey of over 6,000 international students, conducted by the Migrant Worker Justice Initiative, 23 per cent have experienced verbal racist abuse during the pandemic. “We recognise that there will be times where there will be racist or other issues,” Griffiths says.

A domestic graduate student, Jade Murray, was on a Fitzroy tram last Sunday when a drunk Australian man boarded and started shouting at some Asian students “Fuck China, Fuck communism”. They left the tram. “I was scared,” says Murray.“I couldn’t imagine how they felt. People don’t deserve this hate.”

Yuting, who asked not to be named, is a Singaporean Chinese student. She shows The Citizen a news story about two Asian students who were assaulted in an unprovoked attack in central Melbourne on 15 April in 2020. “I don’t often go outside Melbourne city,” she says. “You feel less likely to be attacked when a lot of international students are here.”

That attack happened two weeks after former prime minister Scott Morrison told international students: “It’s time to go home”. The comment provoked wide distress and anger among students. “When the council heard the Morrison government say that, we actually said the opposite,” says Griffiths.

“We said that students can stay and that we will care for those students.”

Students can get advice on accommodation, employment, legal concerns and other issues through the city’s The Couch International Student Centre, located in the CBD at 69 Bourke St. The initiative also provides spaces to meet, events and a free meal program.