IDP Education CEO Andrew Barkla has told the Universities Australia conference that the federal government needs to provide a clear message on when and how Australia’s borders will open.
Barkla said Australia was losing international student market share to other countries because it does not have a clear plan at this stage. He said that interest in Australia as a study destination from countries like India and Indonesia had slumped in the wake of the budget announcement that Australia’s borders were not likely to fully reopen until 2022.
From The AFR:
“Australia is losing significant demand share relative to competitors”, [IDP Education chief executive Andrew Barkla said]…
“We believe that we need to have a government that sends a clear message as to how and when the borders will open”…
“Currently, China, India, Indonesia and Nepal are all showing a strong downward trend for Australia as we move into semester one and semester two intakes”.
IDP Education is an education/migration agent. that advises students how to undertake study for permanent residency:
Edu-migration agents.
IDP Education has a vested interest in opening the immigration floodgates, since it profits directly from doing so. Therefore, anything it says should be taken with a tablespoon of salt.
Reduced international student numbers would be a good result as it would move Australia more into line with similarly developed nations whose concentrations of international students was less than half of Australia’s in 2017:
Australia’s international student concentration was extreme.
Even if Australia’s international student numbers were halved, it would still have the highest concentration of foreign students in the developed world.
The costs of Australia’s extreme international student concentration are also never taken into account, including the degradation of entry and teaching standards, which has badly eroded the quality of education provided to domestic students.
On this point, honorary Deakin academic, Louise Johnson provided salient insight to Fairfax:
[Johnson points] to a “cancerous” cycle of chasing foreign student fees to fund the research volumes needed for global rankings aimed at securing yet more international students.
COVID aside, she says, too much teaching is now online, impersonal, inferior and left to an increasingly casualised, overworked and exploited sessional staff…
“Some [international] students have been fabulously engaged. But I’ve also had cohorts in my class who had no idea what I was talking about, couldn’t read what I was asking them to read, and who certainly could not write in a way that I regard as university standard.”
The sad reality is that Australia’s universities had become key players in the edu-migration scam, whereby they ‘clipped the ticket’ and earned fat fees on international students seeking work rights and permanent residency, assisted by the likes of IDP Education.
The whole edu-migration industry must be brought to heel with universities forced to return to their primary purpose of educating Australians, not behaving like migration ‘middle-men’ selling low-quality degrees for maximum profit.
Halving international student numbers, so that they more accurately reflect developed country norms, is a good place to start on the road to reform.
