Scaremongering over the ‘collapse’ in international student numbers continues to ramp up with the edu-migration lobby now warning that Australia will lose market share to the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States unless we quickly open our international border to students.
The mainstream media is also awash with articles featuring ‘heartbroken’ students shattered that their dreams of living and working in Australia have been dashed due to our international border closure.
The below extracts from The Guardian captures this new line of lobbying:
With Australia’s borders all but closed, many young people who long dreamed of an antipodean education are going elsewhere…
But as Australia’s borders remain closed to international students, Hossain and his friends are among an increasing number of students opting for Canada, the UK or the US rather than Australia…
Hossain says he has seen the mood shift – among students and also among the education agents who sell education packages to different countries…
Ravi Singh, the managing director of Global Reach, a company which promotes Australian universities in India and south Asia, says he has noticed the change in demand… Global Reach has doubled enquiries for UK and Canada…
Singh has called on the government to open the borders to international students, who he says are willing to go through quarantine, and provide an economic benefit to the country over three or four years.
What these types of articles never mention is that Australia’s concentration of international students towers above these other nations.
As shown in the next chart, Australia had roughly 2.5 times the concentration of international students as the United Kingdom’s, triple Canada’s, and five times the United Sates’ in 2017:
The downsides of this extreme concentration of international students in Australia was massive, with entry and teaching standards gutted, and freedom of speech torched as CCP influence escalated.
These downsides were neatly encapsulated in the recent survey from South Australia’s Independent Commissioner Against Corruption (ICAC), which raised real concerns around the low entry standards applying to international students, alongside the pressure to pass failing students and cheating.
This ICAC survey also noted the common belief among staff that our university’s rabid pursuit of international student fees is having a corrupting influence on these institutions:
The ‘corporatisation’ or ‘monetisation’ of the university was also the subject of a large volume of feedback (126 respondents). These comments typically described the university as overly focused on money, student fees and the enrolment of full fee-paying students. Seven participants also raised concerns about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for their university which encourage poor practices and behaviours to meet benchmarks…
“The key vulnerability the university faces is its over-reliance on international students’ fees. This impacts on potential corruption in recruitment, enrolment, assessment, academic integrity, student support, misconduct processes and graduation. It is common for senior managers to disregard problems…and make the problem one about ‘poor teaching’ or ‘low quality assessment/curriculum’.”
It follows that the lower intake of international students arising from the COVID-19 pandemic is actually a welcome development. Indeed, Australia should explicitly target a smaller intake of higher quality students by:
- Raising entry standards (particularly English-language proficiency);
- Raising financial requirements; and
- Removing the link between studying, work rights and permanent residency.
These types of reforms would significantly lift student quality, would raise export revenues per student, and would lower enrolment numbers to sensible and sustainable levels that are more in line with international norms. They would also help to improve teaching standards and the experience for domestic students, which should be our universities’ number one priority.
Sadly, the cabal of rent-seekers across the edu-migration industry will oppose these sensible reforms.
