Hey all,

A week ago, ADA NSW brought up the inevitable removal of dentistry from the skilled occupation list. What this means is that international students who have studied side by side with you for the duration of this course will soon be 'sent' home due to the lack of job prospects and visa options. If you feel strongly against this unreasonable act of grouping Australian 'certified' international students with the internationally trained dentists, please sign the petition.

I personally don't think it's fair that dentistry is removed from the list. In addition to being Australian trained and registered, international student funding makes up a huge amount especially since the faculty is having less and less CSP students. Not to mention that most of this degrees are now post-grad only, meaning we internationals are spending 7 years in total for this degree. That's more than $100,000 more of price difference per student in total. And that's not including those who underwent a 4 year undergraduate degree nor those working part time.

Hopefully with enough signatures, we can draw attention to this issue and find a more appropriate way to address it, not just for DMD4 but for all post graduate internationals facing this problem. Forcefully cutting down the supply isn't an ethical answer to this issue. Moreover, as Dr Cockrell mentioned in her lecture, there is no over-supply, with more than 90% of the dental graduates successfully finding a preferred job.

Please share and pass this around.