Over the past six years, Australia has experienced a near doubling of international student numbers:
This surge in international students has delivered universities massive revenue growth, as illustrated by the next chart from the New South Wales Auditor-General:
As you can see, revenue from international students in New South Wales has more than doubled since 2014, and eclipses that derived from domestic university students.
Similar phenomena has taken place across the rest of Australia as the share of international students studying at Australia’s universities has surged:
However, the surge in student numbers and revenue has raised concerns about the way in which the rivers of gold are being spent.
Last week, The Australian reported that New South Wales universities have dramatically lifted their spending on outside service providers like consultants, raising questions about transparency and accountability:
Annual reports of the state’s 10 universities show that last year a total of $610 million was spent on a range of outsourced services…
For example, the University of NSW spent $216m on “contract services (including consultants)” last year, while the University of Sydney spent $125.7m on consultants and contractors last year, up from $92.6m in 2017…
Sharon Bell, who has been closely following the rise of consultancies’ influence in universities for several years, said consulting firms bring “political capital to the higher education sector” and also generate confidence among university governing boards, as most are now dominated by corporate leaders…
Professor Bell said she was also aware of circumstances in which consultancies’ advice had been detrimental to the financial health of universities because their strategies were not contextualised and were predicated on unrealistic and unattainable assumptions.
The Grattan Institute’s Higher education fellow, Ittima Cherastidtham, has also raised concern about how universities are spending their revenue boom:
[Ms Cherastidtham] said eventually universities would face questions over the amount of their income from foreign students that did not end up going towards teaching them…
“Overall universities are trying to get more and more out of international students,” she said.
Indeed, data from the Department of Education shows that the ratio of students to academic staff at Australia’s universities has increased from an average of 20.05 to 21.44 between 2009 and 2017:
As shown in the next table, between 2000 and 2017, overall university student numbers rose by 118%, with international students skyrocketing by 351%. This compares to 49% growth in full-time non-academic staff and 43% growth in academic staff:
In 2000 full-time non-academic staff outnumbered academic staff by nearly 7,000, whereas in 2017 the difference increased to just under 12,000. Thus, Australia’s universities have padded themselves with bureaucracy rather than investing in teaching staff and improving the educational experience for students.
The relative reduction in teaching staff is particularly worrying given international students generally require more intensive teaching than domestic students, owing to their poorer English-language proficiency. Therefore, the increased student loads, combined with the higher maintenance of these international students, implies a meaningful erosion of teaching capacity and quality across Australia’s university system.
Clearly, it is time for Australia’s governments to stipulate a maximum student to teaching staff ratio for Australia’s universities?
Australia’s universities must be mandated to reinvest their international student bounty into front-line staff, thereby ensuring that it is used to improve the educational experience for students, instead of wasting money on university bureaucracy and consultants, and destroying standards.
