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INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION
students, and they want to do formative things in terms of playing sport or being part of societies or clubs, as well as doing their legitimate degree. So that aspect – which is a traditional view – is going to be there.
Will students want to spend part of their time elsewhere? If they could, they would, but I think there are real cost impediments to that. I think that’ s why the government’ s initiatives around the new Colombo plan and allowing these short courses are a great start, because the idea that young undergraduates can afford to spend a whole year overseas might be a bridge too far.
What role has the internet played in international student mobility? We heard in the session I was chairing that the impact has been relatively weak in an educational sense, because students don’ t want to do their whole course online, they want to be part of an immersive experience in an English-speaking economy – that’ s one of our selling points.
The internet has had a phenomenal effect in terms of allowing students to know what’ s available in a way that international students couldn’ t possibly have known 30 years ago. They’ ve been able to go on websites and use international rankings to form a view about which country, which course and which institution they want to attend.
So how do we support or serve the international students who come here? You’ ve obviously heard of the 7-Eleven scandal, how do we prevent something like that happening again? I think the issue there is partly government policy around what safeguards are put in place for people who are in casual employment. [ Universities could add a safeguard by ] trying to make sure that when there is a chance to create jobs on campus, we think carefully about how to make those sorts of roles available to all categories of students. We [ should ] move to a slightly more North American model, where students are studying and working and providing services to one another on campus. That works well in North America and we’ ve got a lot to learn from that.
What pastoral support can we offer to these students? There was an interesting point made in the session I was chairing. We have relatively large marketing and recruiting teams, but we have relatively small career services where there is a dedicated person trying to assist international students.
We’ ve got sophisticated career services in many universities – Wollongong has a fantastic career service – and what we need to do is make sure we carve out enough time and resources to say there’ s a proposition for international students to think about post-graduation work experience. We could build that into the skillset for those people as they head towards graduation.
What about helping break down the language barrier? One suggestion put forward in the session was that maybe the English standard should be reduced? I’ m not sure about reducing the standard. I know at Wollongong we have [ English ] standards for people coming into full degrees. What we do have at Wollongong, and many other universities in Australia, are distinctive pathway colleges. That sets us apart from the UK.
We’ ve got the infrastructure to have good investments in English-language programs. You could take students coming in and say,‘ How do I top you up so that you get to a prescribed level [ of English ] that is the right level for that course?’
I think the other thing we can do is say,‘ Once you’ re on the course, how do we stop you slipping backwards linguistically and make sure there are top-ups available throughout the course of the year?’ That requires resources and time, but those things are all possible. On reflection, it would be one way of learning from the data that we saw in the session I was in.
One last question. How can we help international students become entrepreneurial and innovative? I think by being inclusive with the programs we’ ve got. Wollongong has a sophisticated program in entrepreneurship and enterprise development. It’ s open to everybody, and when I’ ve been to the student award nights, a substantial proportion of the people who have made a pitch and won prizes have been international students. Sometimes working with young Australians, sometimes as an international consortia.
As long as we say to all students this is a cool thing to do if you want to do it – that it’ s open to everybody – and we make sure international students are not marginalised, I think we’ ll get a lot of success in that area and, hopefully, they’ ll go on and build enterprises for the future. ■
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