It’s time universities looked after Australian students

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MB has regularly argued that our universities’ rabid pursuit of international student fees has damaged entry and teaching standards, eroding the quality of education provided to domestic students.

This claim is evidenced by:

  1. The dramatic increase in the number of students to academic staff;
  2. Domestic students being forced into group assignments with non-English speaking foreign students, thus acting like unpaid tutors that cross-subsidise their marks and help them pass; and
  3. The massive increase in cheating by international students.

On Friday, Associate Professor Salvatore Babones supported my claims, publishing an article in The Australian explaining how “Uni leaders have abandoned our domestic students”.

According to Babones, universities are continuing to cater to international students stuck offshore by conducting lectures online, despite schools and TAFE returning to in-person classes. Worse, international students have received discounts on their fees – a luxury not extended to domestic students:

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Administrators save on infrastructure costs. Professors can Zoom in from home. International students can stay enrolled, even if they can’t get into the country. And the international student revenues keep flowing in (at least for now).

There’s only one constituency that really seems upset by the lack of in-person classes, and they hardly figure in the calculations of university administrators: Australia’s domestic students. There is no pressing need to pander to them. After all, where else can they go?

Many universities have offered discounts or rebates for inter­national students who continue to enrol despite being taught online, but Australia’s domestic students pay the same tuition as always, and the government pays the same subsidies to support them.

From the above, the obvious question arises: if our universities believe that online education is just as good as in-person, then why do we need to physically import international students into Australia to sell them education? Salvatore Babones provides the answer:

The cynical answer is that they will continue to embrace online education only as long as international students remain offshore. When travel restrictions are lifted, they will suddenly discover that offline education is superior — since there’s no logical reason for the government to grant visas for students to travel to Australia to take online classes.

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Salvatore Babones is 100% correct. Australia’s universities are the key players in the edu-migration scam, whereby they ‘clip the ticket’ and earn fat fees on international students studying in Australia for working rights and permanent residency.

The welfare of domestic students are ignored completely, despite public universities existing first and foremost to serve the public. As noted by Babones:

When enterprise-level decisions about the very character of the learning environment are driven by the ­vicissitudes of the international student marketplace, university leaders have clearly lost their way.

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That’s the issue in a nutshell.

It’s time for Australia’s policy makers to reel the universities in. They must be forced to return to their primary purpose of educating Australians, not behaving as immigration ‘middle-men’ selling low quality cookie cutter degrees for maximum profit.

About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.