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about 20-plus years, particularly in Asia and especially in China. So
this is a well-tried and tested strand of our international activity.
Why specifically India and why specifically Ahmedabad? Well,
obviously India is a priority country of engagement for us and
most if not all the Australian universities. We’ve been doing quite
a bit of work there over the years, and we actually ran a master’s
program in Ahmedabad about six or seven years ago with the
same university partner. At that stage it was pretty small scale. It
was one program and it was pretty successful for the students,
but the cohort was really too small to sustain it, so it’s a strategic
play to revisit that strand of our strategy in a key country in Asia. In
Ahmedabad, we already had an existing, long-standing partner of
nearly 10 years, so it seemed like the right place and the right time
to reactivate that particular strategy.
We work hard with our international partners
to deliberately try to grow our engagement
across different dimensions.
Did you choose IT specifically because it is an area of interest to
Indian students?
Yes, we did. We’re expecting 50 per cent of the students in this
program will be studying part-time as they’ll be working already.
Because we ran a very specialised master’s program in enterprise
resource planning, SAP and software systems, we know that many
graduates from the previous pilot program have now gone on
t o work in IT. These are highly employable graduates, so we’ve
identified that as an opportunity.
We are also planning to roll out some business master’s courses
later on, because as the economy and all the opportunities develop,
there’s a need for those general management skills as well. But
our research and advice is that the opportunities are around those
specialised IT skills, not generic IT skills, but quite specialised, industry-
focused, employer-focused and in-demand skills.
What’s the perception of Australian universities in India, particularly
Victoria University?
From the increasing engagement between our university sector
and the Indian tertiary education sector, and our vocational sector
as well, that engagement is growing. What’s underneath that, I
think, first from the Australian end, is that our system is a gold
standard, world-respected university system. Universities and
tertiary education providers in India and the Indian government
recognise that, and for many years we’ve had a large number
of Indian students coming over to study in Australia. This is an
extension of that activity, a deepening of that engagement.
For Victoria University, I suppose we’re part of that gold standard
system. Quite recently we were announced as one of the world’s
top 400 universities. We’re in the top 20 young universities, so
we’re very much in that bracket for India as a whole. But it’s a pretty
big question: What’s the reputation around Australian education
in India? But I think underpinning it is that quality dimension, and
then there’s all sorts of strands to that, whether it’s students coming
to studying over here, whether it’s our universities increasingly
sending our students out to India on study experiences, or
engaging with academics. I think it’s that kind of quality dimension
which underpins all of that reputation.
INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION
Will Victoria University face competition from other Australian
universities in India and the surrounding region?
I’m sure we will. We work in a highly collaborative and competitive
way in our system. All Australian universities are hugely engaged
internationally. We have different strategies, but we’re all in this
space. We’re all engaging internationally, and I doubt you would
find a university or a large TAFE within Australia that says it’s not
actively exploring and already working on opportunities in India
and South Asia more generally.
I think this particular opportunity around what we would call
“transnational education”, delivering courses and services in-
country, is a very specialised area, and not all universities have
the same experience as we do at Victoria University. But I would
expect that over time, as opportunities grow and different ways of
delivering and partnering emerge, we’ll expect the same kind of
competition and collaboration as we do in other parts of the world,
including domestically.
Do you expect that some of these graduates will gain jobs in
Australia, or do you think they’ll be looking for employment in India?
The primary expectation I think is that a large number of these
graduates will get jobs in India. It’s where the growth opportunities
are. We know that the small cohort we ran back in 2010 and 2011
are based partly in India and partly in other primarily Asian countries
like Singapore and Malaysia. There may be some pathways for
some of these students to come to Australia. And in time, as with
some of our other transnational education programs, we might
build that into the education model, whereby students have an
opportunity to study part of the course in-country and part of the
course in Australia.
And then there’s the usual kind of post-study work rights, so all of
the work opportunities that come with particular settings would apply
to those students, but that is not actually part of phase one. Phase one
is very much about bringing our offer to a local student market who
will primarily be locally based afterwards, although some of them will
be internationally mobile because of the in-demand nature of the skill
set that they’ll get through these courses.
It was also mentioned that there are some transnational activities
planned between the Indian VU campus and the Australian one. Can
you elaborate on this?
Our strategy around our international partnerships and international
engagement goes back to the concept of different dimensions of
international engagement. We work hard with our international
partners to deliberately try to grow our engagement across
different dimensions. If it starts off, for example, as an education
program, a teaching program in-country, we’ll be actively exploring
opportunities to do things like establish research cooperation
between researchers. We’ll be exploring opportunities to send
our students over to India for short study periods, which we’re
increasingly doing in India.
I think that’s really a reference to the partnership itself, potentially
as other dimensions and other elements of it develop into the
future. Some of that may involve some student mobility both ways
between countries, and staff mobility as well, and potentially some
joint research cooperations. That’s exactly what’s happened in
some of our major partnerships in China. These are over 10, 15
or 20 years. These are long-term partnerships, and lead to that
breadth and depth across different aspects of engagement. ■
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