AUSTRALIA should be braced for a further significant fall in the value of its international education exports as the university sector is hit by the downturn that has been running through the foundation college sector, major private provider Navitas warned yesterday.

Navitas chief executive Rod Jones said Australia's export earnings from the sector in 2010-11 had dropped by $2.7 billion from $18.5bn to $15.8bn, and that the fall this year was likely to be at least as bad.

It's a different message to the one Mr Jones delivered last March, when he confidently predicted the sector had bottomed out in October 2010.

Mr Jones's analysis of the market also differs to Australian Education International, which has estimated the decline in Australian export income from international students fell by 12 per cent in 2010-11, from $18.6bn to $16.3bn.

Mr Jones said that, while the federal government's new streamlined visa-processing changes would eventually buoy the international market for foundation and pathway programs, possibly by the end of the year, the flow-through was likely to weigh on universities for the next two years.

He said that universities sourced about 60 per cent of their students from feeder colleges and that the downturn suffered by the preparatory sector in the wake of an earlier government visa crackdown in 2010 was about to flow through to universities.

"We are going to see some significant issues and impacts on universities, particularly over the next two years," Mr Jones said. "In terms of international students, we aren't going to see any real improvement until we finally get this Knight review stuff locked down."

Earlier, Navitas reported a rise of 9 per cent in first-half net profit to $35.4 million. But the result disappointed the market. Earnings, in particular, were less than expected from Navitas's SAE business acquired last year, student growth in the US having been stymied by delays in securing access to federal government student loan places.