campusreview.com.au
international education
Anyone’s guess
Continuity, contradiction or
crash? Unknowns in the
international student market.
By Monique Skidmore
Anyone who tells you they know what
is going to happen to Australia’s
extraordinarily valuable international
student market is having you on. They can’t
know, because it will all depend on things
that haven’t happened yet.
We don’t know what will happen to the
virus. We don’t know what will happen
in international relations. We don’t know
whether differential responses to the
pandemic by key countries really have a
major effect on their domestic economies.
We don’t know what our typical competitor
countries for international students will do.
And so on.
We can, however, think in scenarios and
start to organise the possibilities.
One could be called the Continuity
scenario where we will be back to business
as usual in a year or two. The fright might
even help us make improvements which
were harder to justify when the going
was good.
Another is the Contradictory scenario.
Here, many things change in different
directions, in complex and contradictory
ways. Some markets contract. Some
expand. Some are more price sensitive.
Some are less. Some think more highly of
Australia, some less.
The third is the Crash scenario where it
turns out that the long-held view is correct
that international student mobility is driven
by rising GDP in countries with young
populations and insufficient domestic
provision at the quality desired by their
expanding middle classes. In this scenario,
their governments decide to invest in
domestic provision to keep the currency at
home and rebuild their nations.
My guess is that the Continuity scenario
turns on the length of the disruption.
The longer it goes on, the greater the
impact and the less likely we could return
to yesterday.
The Contradictory scenario seems the
most plausible. The effects of COVID-19
are so wide-reaching and still unknowable
that the combination of uncertainty,
imperfect knowledge, different risk
appetites and differential impact make it
unlikely that there will later be a simple
explanation of cause and effect.
Crash does seem possible but the least
likely of the three. A lot would have to go
wrong for Australia, and that mysterious
force called sentiment would have to
sweep the world before the end of
international student mobility, for us or
anyone, could occur.
If this is a reasonable analysis, we ought
to think about improvements we would
want anyway in a Continuity scenario. We
ought to consider how we can change so
as to emerge a winner in a Contradictory
scenario. And we should at least ensure
that our domestic education system is
strong should an international crash occur.
Areas for attention include the overall
business model for international students,
the products and prices on offer and the
efficiency of our education system.
A sceptical view of the business model
for international university students
amounts almost to a Faustian one. The
most surplus is extracted from them, and
the service offered is at the lowest cost,
so that the margin can be harvested for
research and capital projects. This simply
can’t go on. It’s an uncertain basis for the
nation’s research effort and the dubious
ethics of it might well come back to haunt
us. Two decades of charging what the
market will bear has led us to become
reliant on too few countries.
Add in to all this what might be thought
of as a sleaze overlay. Australia relies on
recruiting agents more than any other
country. Some of those agents are players
in the Australian student accommodation
and property markets. They can’t be
supervised sufficiently. And somewhere
in all this students arrive with English
language scores that appear to be
sufficient on paper, but which don’t appear
to enable them to engage academically
or socially in English. It needs cleaning up.
The obvious route is through institutions
doing their own selection of students, by
video, using data and analytics, and taking
responsibility for it all.
The products on offer are tired. Lectures
are mostly watched online afterwards.
Small groups comprise too many of the
students’ fellow nationals, and they have
been declining in frequency anyway as part
of the soft gouging that has occurred.
If fees are to be brought down, to price
in the middle classes of more countries
and to enable us to play the long game,
the cost base of institutions needs to be
reduced significantly. Almost every other
sector in the economy and society has
been undergoing digital transformation
and embracing new operating models.
Universities’ ways of working have not
changed significantly, although surplus
labour has been extracted from insecure
contingent workers.
We can devote the time to think about
all this, if only from the time saved in
commuting and travelling by air, neither of
which turns out to be as necessary as we
used to think. ■
Monique Skidmore has been a deputy
vice-chancellor international at several
Australian universities.
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