Introduction
International education is one of Australia’s largest service industries and a defining feature of the higher education sector, with more than 700,000 international students enrolled in Australian institutions in recent years (Department of Education, 2023). Yet the same students who sustain this sector frequently confront financial precarity that undermines their capacity to eat adequately. Food insecurity, understood as limited or uncertain access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food acquired in socially acceptable ways, has emerged as a significant but under-examined welfare concern on Australian campuses (Gallegos et al., 2014). For international students the risk is compounded by a distinctive combination of pressures that domestic students do not face to the same degree.
The cost of living in Australian capital cities has climbed sharply, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS, 2023) recording sustained increases in the Consumer Price Index for food, rents and utilities. International students on the student visa (subclass 500) may work no more than 48 hours per fortnight during teaching periods, a condition that caps earning capacity at precisely the point where expenses are highest. Unlike domestic students, they are ineligible for most Commonwealth income support and are required to be substantially self-funded as a condition of enrolment under the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) framework. Housing stress intensifies the problem, since many international students spend well beyond the conventional 30 per cent income threshold used to define rental stress in tight metropolitan markets.
These material conditions matter because food insecurity is associated with poorer psychological wellbeing and weaker academic performance. Students who are food insecure report higher psychological distress, difficulty concentrating, absenteeism and lower marks (Bruening et al., 2017). This proposal sets out a mixed methods study to examine the prevalence, determinants and consequences of food insecurity among international university students in Australia, and to assess the reach of current institutional responses.
Problem Statement
Despite growing recognition of student hardship, the evidence base on international student food insecurity in Australia remains thin and fragmented. Foodbank Australia (2023) reports that tertiary students are over-represented among those seeking emergency food relief, and university welfare services describe rising demand. Existing Australian studies establish that food insecurity is common on campuses (Hughes et al., 2011; Gallegos et al., 2014; Whatnall et al., 2020), but they typically pool international and domestic cohorts, draw on a single institution, or rely on ad hoc single-item measures rather than a validated multi-item scale. Consequently, universities and policymakers lack robust and comparable prevalence estimates for the international cohort specifically, a clear understanding of the mechanisms that drive their heightened risk, and evidence on which campus responses actually reduce hardship. This study is designed to address that gap directly.
Aim and Research Questions
The aim of this study is to examine the prevalence, determinants and academic and wellbeing consequences of food insecurity among international students enrolled in coursework and higher degree units at Australian universities, and to evaluate the reach of current institutional responses. Three research questions are posed:
- What is the prevalence and severity of food insecurity among international university students in Australia, as measured by a validated food security instrument?
- Which structural, financial and demographic factors are associated with food insecurity in this cohort?
- How do international students experience and cope with food insecurity, and how adequate are current campus and policy responses?
Literature Review
Measuring food insecurity
The dominant instrument for measuring household food insecurity is the United States Department of Agriculture Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM), which classifies respondents as high, marginal, low or very low food security on the basis of their experiences over the preceding twelve months (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2021). The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW, 2020) observes that routine national monitoring in Australia has historically relied on a single survey question, which understates true prevalence and cannot capture severity or the experience of children in a household. Adopting the multi-item HFSSM therefore represents a methodological advance for the Australian setting, allowing severity gradients to be estimated and compared against international benchmarks.
Determinants among international students
International reviews consistently identify financial strain as the proximate driver of student food insecurity (Bruening et al., 2017). In the Australian context, specific structural factors sharpen this risk. The 48 hour per fortnight work limitation, ineligibility for Commonwealth income support, and obligations to repay education loans or remit funds to family reduce disposable income for essentials (Universities Australia, 2018). Housing costs consume a disproportionate share of student budgets, and rental stress in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane leaves little margin for food once accommodation is paid. Currency fluctuations and up-front tuition further erode purchasing power. These determinants tend to cluster, so that a student facing high rent and capped work hours is frequently the same student skipping meals.
Coping strategies and campus responses
Students experiencing food insecurity adopt a range of coping strategies, including skipping meals, reducing dietary quality, purchasing cheap energy-dense foods, and increasing paid work at the expense of study time (Hughes et al., 2011; Whatnall et al., 2020). Such strategies carry both nutritional and academic costs, and they may become entrenched over a degree. Campus responses in Australia have expanded to include food pantries, subsidised or free meal programs, emergency hardship grants and referral to community food relief (Foodbank Australia, 2023). However, evaluation of these responses is limited, and uptake may be constrained by stigma and by international students’ unfamiliarity with the welfare services available to them. The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA, 2022) now expects registered providers to attend to the wellbeing and safety of their students, giving institutions a regulatory as well as an ethical reason to act.
Conceptual Framework
The study is guided by the conceptual model presented in Figure 1, which positions food insecurity as a mediating state linking structural determinants to student outcomes. Structural drivers, comprising cost of living, the visa work cap, housing stress and limited support networks, shape the likelihood of food insecurity, which is operationalised through the HFSSM. Food insecurity in turn prompts coping responses and influences psychological wellbeing and academic outcomes. Campus and policy responses are modelled as a moderator that may weaken the pathway from structural disadvantage to hardship. The model integrates the ecological logic of upstream determinants with the measurable, individual-level constructs required for empirical testing.
Methodology
Design
This study adopts a sequential explanatory mixed methods design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018), in which a quantitative survey phase is followed by a qualitative interview phase that explains and contextualises the statistical findings. The design suits the research questions because the survey can estimate prevalence and identify associated factors at scale, while the interviews recover the lived experience and coping practices that numbers alone cannot convey.
Participants and sampling
The survey will recruit approximately 500 international students enrolled across at least four Australian universities in different states, spanning metropolitan and regional campuses so that varied rental and labour markets are represented. Stratified quota sampling will approximate the sector distribution of international students by course level and broad region of origin, drawing on published enrolment data (Department of Education, 2023). Recruitment will proceed through international student associations, faculty newsletters, campus notice boards and the student support channels promoted on the Study Australia platform. A subsample of 20 students, purposively selected to reflect a range of food security levels, countries of origin and course types, will take part in semi-structured interviews until data saturation is judged to have been reached.
Measures and instruments
All constructs will be assessed with validated instruments wherever available, as shown in Table 1. Estimated survey completion time is 18 minutes.
Table 1: Constructs, instruments and their role in the study
| Construct | Instrument or measure | Description | Role in analysis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food security status | USDA Household Food Security Survey Module, 18 items (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2021) | Classifies respondents as high, marginal, low or very low food security over the prior 12 months | Primary outcome |
| Financial strain | Investigator items adapted from national income surveys (ABS, 2023) | Income sources, weekly food budget, capacity to meet an unexpected expense | Predictor |
| Housing situation | Investigator-developed items | Tenure, weekly rent, occupants per dwelling, rental stress above 30 per cent of income | Predictor |
| Work and visa hours | Self-report | Hours worked per fortnight relative to the 48 hour student visa condition | Predictor |
| Psychological distress | Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, K10 (Kessler et al., 2002) | 10 item validated measure of non-specific distress used in Australian health collections | Outcome |
| Academic outcomes | Self-report plus weighted average mark band | Concentration, attendance and self-reported grade band | Outcome |
| Coping strategies | Adapted coping checklist | Meal skipping, food relief use, remittance reliance, informal support | Descriptive and qualitative |
| Demographics | Standard items | Age, gender, country of origin, course level, visa subclass | Covariates and stratifiers |
Note. The K10 is the distress measure used in national Australian health collections, enabling comparison of sample scores with published population benchmarks.
Data analysis
Quantitative data will be analysed to address Research Questions 1 and 2. Prevalence and severity will be estimated using descriptive statistics, reporting the proportion of respondents in each HFSSM category with confidence intervals. Bivariate tests will screen candidate correlates, after which multivariable logistic regression will identify the structural, financial and demographic factors independently associated with food insecurity, adjusting for course level and region of origin. As an illustration of the reporting approach, a subgroup prevalence is calculated as the number of food-insecure respondents divided by the subgroup total; for example, 168 divided by 500 equals 0.336, or 33.6 per cent. Qualitative interviews will be transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically following Braun and Clarke (2006), moving from familiarisation and coding to the development and review of themes. Integration will occur at the interpretation stage through joint displays that place quantitative associations alongside the themes that help explain them.
Ethical Considerations
International students constitute a potentially vulnerable cohort, given their reliance on continued enrolment for visa validity, their distance from established support networks, and the sensitivity of questions about hardship. Approval will be sought from the administering university’s Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) and the project will be conducted in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research. Participation will be voluntary and based on informed consent, with explicit assurance that involvement is unconnected to academic standing, visa status or access to any support service.
Several safeguards will operate throughout. Survey responses will be de-identified at the point of collection, interview recordings will be stored separately from consent records on encrypted Australian servers, and findings will be reported only at group level so that students from small cohorts cannot be identified. Because questions about going without food may cause distress, every participant will be provided with contact details for university counselling, financial hardship and food relief services, and interviewers will follow a written protocol for pausing or ending a session if a participant becomes upset. No incentive will be structured so as to be coercive for students in financial difficulty.
Project Timeline
The project is scheduled over twelve months, as set out in Table 2. Ethics approval operates as a gate on all data collection, and the qualitative phase is timed to follow preliminary analysis of the survey so that interview sampling can be informed by the emerging quantitative picture.
Table 2: Twelve-month project timeline by phase, activity and month
| Phase | Activity | Months |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Establishment | Finalise instruments, lodge and obtain HREC approval, pilot the survey with 20 students | 1-2 |
| 2. Survey collection | Recruit and administer the survey across participating universities, monitor quotas | 3-5 |
| 3. Preliminary analysis | Data cleaning, reliability checks, descriptive and regression analysis, select interview subsample | 5-6 |
| 4. Interview collection | Conduct 20 semi-structured interviews to saturation, transcribe recordings | 6-8 |
| 5. Qualitative analysis | Thematic coding, theme development and review, member checking of selected findings | 8-10 |
| 6. Integration and reporting | Joint-display integration, draft report and manuscript, briefing for university welfare services | 10-12 |
Significance
The study offers practical and scholarly contributions. For universities, robust prevalence and determinant data will support targeted, evidence-based welfare provision and help satisfy the wellbeing expectations that TEQSA (2022) now places on registered providers. Identifying which coping strategies and support gaps are most common will allow limited hardship budgets to be directed where they reduce the most harm. For policymakers, findings will inform debate about the visa work cap, income support eligibility and the adequacy of housing settings for international students, connecting a welfare issue to the settings governed under the ESOS framework. The study also contributes methodologically by applying a validated multi-item scale to a cohort usually assessed with blunt single-item measures, producing estimates that can be compared over time and across institutions.
Limitations
Several limitations are acknowledged in advance. Recruitment through student associations and campus channels will not yield a probability sample, so prevalence estimates should be read as indicative rather than population-representative. All measures are self-reported, and questions about hardship and coping are subject to social desirability bias, which may lead some students to understate difficulty. The cross-sectional survey establishes association rather than causation, and the twelve-month recall period of the HFSSM may be affected by memory error. Sampling from a subset of universities, while deliberately spread across states and campus types, limits generalisability to the whole sector. These constraints are mitigated by the validated core instrument, the mixed methods design and the transparent reporting of sampling and response.
Conclusion
Food insecurity among international university students sits at the intersection of rising living costs, a capped capacity to earn, insecure housing and exclusion from the domestic safety net, yet it is measured poorly and understood only partially in the Australian setting. By applying a validated food security scale to a multi-institution sample and pairing it with interviews that recover students’ own coping practices, the proposed study aims to produce the prevalence estimates, determinant analysis and experiential insight that universities and policymakers currently lack. The intended outcome is not only a clearer picture of who goes without food and why, but an evidence base for the campus and policy responses that could relieve it.
References
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