INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION campusreview. com. au
Straight talk
Addressing Campus Review’ s recent Futureproof Now conference in Sydney, International Education Association of Australia chief executive Phil Honeywood discussed some home truths the sector must acknowledge.
I want to talk about what I’ m calling‘ five plus one’ issues that are make-or-break for international education in Australia. This is about diversity of markets, stale curriculums, delivery modes, competitive cost structures, the student experience, and government policy and regulation.
DIVERSITY The latest inbound enrolment figures, produced by the Australian Immigration and Education departments respectively, indicate that we have an incredible over-reliance on two markets: China, for 35 per cent of our inbound international students, and India for about 15 per cent.
When it comes to India, we’ re reliant on north India – the Punjab – and there are quite a few issues around quality that are, unfortunately, beginning to resonate again from that marketplace.
It’ s low-hanging fruit that we’ ve been used to in Australian international education recruitment and there must be efforts to diversify the market.
Now, if you want to [ say the ] glass is half full, you’ d say that at least many of our institutions are now very much engaged with Latin America, and increasingly attempting to engage with Africa. But the whole notion of green-shoot markets has not been an imperative for this $ 18 billion-a-year industry, [ even though there are valuable ] soft-diplomacy benefits that we know can be derived if this [ becomes a priority and ] is done well.
[ There is ] a need, an imperative, to diversify our markets … and also to drill down into what’ s going on in new education hub countries.
For example, China is now in the top five education hub countries in the world because it’ s doing a great deal of scholarship work in Africa and parts of Asia to bring students to China. We all know France and Germany are in the top five destination countries, largely because they don’ t charge tuition fees to international students.
We also have to look at diversity in the classroom. Each year, I speak to the Council of Australian Business Deans and increasingly they’ re telling me that it’ s not unusual to have 80 per cent of students in a particular class who are native Mandarin speakers. Clearly there must be conversations about diversity in the classroom between our marketing departments, our recruitment departments and our academics, to ensure that something happens in that space.
STALE CURRICULUMS AND DELIVERY MODES I was in China in March, I was talking to some key Australian Embassy figures there and other key people involved in the sector and they said to me that there’ s concern being raised that Australia’ s over-reliance on business studies – more than 50 percent of full fee-paying international students studying
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