INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION campusreview. com. au
Students from overseas pump large amounts of money into the local economies surrounding the universities they attend.
Rolf Gerritsen interviewed by James Wells
Spending power measures up
Determining the local economic impact of international students in most areas of Australia is nigh impossible because the data is a mess, one expert argues.
In a study soon to be published in the Australasian Journal of Regional Studies, professor Rolf Gerritsen, political economist at the Charles Darwin University-hosted Northern Institute, sets out to counter a 2011 Grattan Institute report that stated federal investment in regional universities“ can only be justified on equity or social grounds”, not economically.
Gerritsen focuses his counter-argument solely on CDU and the economic benefits its international students bring. He says CDU, and probably the University of Tasmania, are the only two universities that can accurately determine the local economic impact of international students on their area. He explains this was because they’ re the only universities in their respective territory and state.
“ There are five [ universities ] in Perth, three or four in Adelaide, five or six in Melbourne, five in Sydney, etc.,” he tells Campus Review.” We don’ t know because [ many international students ] didn’ t have student visas or didn’ t come in on the relevant visas that deal with education. Statistics in the whole area are a mess and the immigration statistics don’ t match up to the federal education statistics. The ABS also has different statistics.”
If the data is messy, that didn’ t stop the University of New South Wales from trying. A UNSW-commissioned report – written by Deloitte – pinpoints the amount UNSW’ s international students spent throughout New South Wales in 2014 at $ 338 million.
What figure did Gerritsen give for the economic impact of CDU’ s international students on the Northern Territory? It’ s $ 51 million a year. And he expects this to almost triple, to $ 151 million, over the next decade.
With Australia’ s international education sector recently valued at $ 20 billion and targeting annual intakes of 1 million foreign students, Gerritsen sits down to discuss how regional universities fit into the mix.
CR: Can you run us through the key points of your paper?
RG: I wrote this paper as a reaction to some papers that had been published by the Grattan Institute where they argued that expenditure on regional development was inefficient and could not be justified in economic terms. In their papers, they mentioned regional universities as an example of expenditures that could better used on scholarships for regional students to gather at universities in metropolitan Australia.
Regional universities do consume taxpayer dollars, but they also earn fees from international students. For various reasons,
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