Bloomberg has penned an interesting article on how the world’s universities have been forced to face their addiction to international students:
The outbreak has jolted universities worldwide, upending a multi-billion dollar international student market that underpins the finances of many leading institutions… an issue the education industry will have to confront once it emerges from the crisis.
Few establishments understand this better than the University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest, where Chinese made up 24% of the total student population last year…
The crisis offers China the opportunity to promote its own universities as online lectures and life in lockdown take the luster off a foreign degree experience, according to Babones. And that may pose a longer-term challenge to the education sector internationally.
Li says many of her friends were upset by the travel ban — an anger that may influence where they choose to study in the future.
“They really can’t blame anyone in China, so they blame the Australian government,” she said…
Professor Salvatore Babones claims that the coronavirus also offers China the unique opportunity to bring students home and bolster its domestic universities:
It would also help them meet their long-term goal of bringing students home…
For some of Australia’s most China-dependent universities, it would be catastrophic. But for China, it would give a welcome boost to its own universities at a time of economic uncertainty while helping the country further shore up its restrictive currency regime. What is more, China faces a long-term decline in the size of its university-age student cohorts due to the historical legacy of its now-defunct one-child policy. In the coming decade, it will either have to bring its international students home or start closing its own universities.
As we know, no country is more dependent on international students, and Chinese students in particular, than Australia.
According to Salvatore Babones, Australia’s reliance on international students dwarfed all other developed nations in 2017, accounting for more than one quarter of total university enrolments:
Australia is also the most reliant on Chinese students, whom accounted for 11% of total university enrolments in 2017:
The concentration likely increased further in the two years to 2019, given the explosion in both total and Chinese students over the past two years:
2019 very likely represented the historical ‘high water mark’ for Chinese students. Now comes the bust.
