Getting a grasp on the number of Chinese international students still stuck overseas because of the travel ban has been a difficult task.
When the travel ban was first announced last month, the Department of Home Affairs stated that 106,000 Chinese students were stranded at home.
However, with many Chinese students travelling via third countries like Thailand and Dubai to skirt the travel ban, aided and abetted by Australia’s universities, this number was always going to fall.
Now, we have received credible estimates of the number of Chinese students still stuck overseas.
For example, Fairfax over the weekend reported that “about 85,000 Chinese international students enrolled in Australian universities remain overseas”, whereas The AFR similarly reported that “a total of 25,360 Chinese students have arrived in Australia since February 2, when the coronavirus isolation ban came into effect”.
Therefore, given there were around 165,000 Chinese students enrolled at Australia’s universities at the end of 2019 (see next chart), we can conclude that around half appear likely to miss enrolling in time for semester one.
If true, this would deal a multi-billion dollar blow to both the education sector and broader Australian economy given China accounted for $12.1 billion of education ‘exports’ in 2019, comprising tuition fees and living expenses:
However, that is not the end of the story. The extension of the travel ban to South Korea and Iran has also left potentially thousands more students stranded abroad and unable to commence their studies in Australia:
The delay for South Korean students will be a blow to the vocational education and training sector sector, which had 16,159 students from South Korea enrolled at the end of December.
There are also 5291 South Korean students enrolled in English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) schools and 5445 at university…
There are 2236 Iranian students enrolled at Australian universities, although most are doing post-graduate work including Phds, which meant some were already in the country before recent ban was applied.
South Korea and Iran are obviously much smaller sources of international students than China, as illustrated in the below charts:
Nevertheless, the extension of the travel ban to these nations poses another headache for Australia’s education industry, which is facing a sharp fall in overall international student enrolments.
