The Australian’s Higher Education Editor, Tim Dodd, believes Australia needs to do everything in its power to hold onto or expand Chinese international student enrolments:
If all goes well, most of these students will return to complete their degree, which means it’s revenue deferred, not revenue permanently lost…
The long-term danger to Australian universities from COVID-19 is not that students who are already in the pipeline will change their minds. The greater danger lies in the possibility that Chinese students who haven’t yet decided where they will study next year, or the year after, will opt for a country other than Australia.
Jin Sun, who advises Australian universities on their partnerships with overseas institutions (including many in China), puts it this way:.. “Students will remember the help they received when they were stranded”…
“For swing students the risk (of going elsewhere) is at least medium. They have too many options,” Sun says…
Chinese conventional and social media has given plenty of coverage to unfortunate incidents in Australia, such as detaining, cancelling visas of, or sending home Chinese students who had, through no fault of their own, arrived here just after the travel ban was announced.
For these students, Canada may look attractive. Even more of a magnet is Britain, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson restored a two-year post-study work visa for international students last year. It’s part of his strategy to make post-Brexit Britain more open to the world. Britain’s one-year masters degrees, as opposed to Australia’s two-year degrees, are also a drawcard. And the fact Boris is letting Huawei into Britain could also make the country look more friendly in Chinese eyes…
The fact neither Canada nor Britain applied a coronavirus travel ban to China also could help make those countries seem more friendly to Chinese students…
Chinese students (most of them in universities) spent more than $12bn in Australia in 2018-19. It’s a very big market. So it’s time for some novel strategies to be sought by universities to keep the Chinese students coming.
Nowhere in the article does it mention any downsides from Australia’s unhealthy concentration of Chinese students, which dwarfs other developed nations, including Canada and the United Kingdom:
As shown in the above chart from professor Salvatore Babones, Chinese accounted for 11% of all student enrolments across Australian universities in 2017, versus less than 6% in the United Kingdom and just 3% in Canada.
Worse, Australia’s concentration of Chinese students has likely grown further given the 23% surge in Chinese enrolments at Australia’s universities over the two years to 2019:
With a moderated intake of Chinese students, English-language proficiency and teaching standards would likely improve, incidences of cheating and academic misconduct would likely fall, and domestic students may no longer be forced to work on group assignments where everybody gets the same score despite only a few locals fluent in English meaningfully contributing to course work.
While it would obviously hurt them financially, the Coronavirus may be just the hit “our” universities need to wean themselves off the sugar teat of Chinese international students, which was carelessly allowed to grow out of control.
