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VC’ s corner
trap into which we, the universities, unwittingly walked. Governments proceeded to loosen immigration policies, making it easier to attract international students; we obliged by going out and recruiting more of them every time the government took away yet another slice of our domestic funding.
It could have been fine had we shown some collective discipline to use domestic / international balance to maintain a healthy homeostasis in the system. Instead, seduced by a newfound source of cash, we set out on a free-for-all expansion of the system. It has now gotten to a point where some are starting to talk openly about large international-only campuses within Australia, setting aside even a pretence of our traditional espousal of the virtues of international educational experience. We are now dangerously close to losing the plot.
Let me hasten to clarify, I am not opposed to international education; au contraire, I am a big fan of it. I am also a beneficiary of it, as I submit are the three countries of my primary affiliation to which my international experience has contributed – the country of my birth, my citizenship and my present residency. Nor do I think that charging tuition is inherently wrong; for one, international tuition allows us to do what would otherwise be a challenge under the circumstances. It is how we view( as against how we say we do) the international education, how we manage it and the language we use that concerns me. Let me elaborate.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics last October put the value of our educational export at a record $ 28 billion – the third largest behind iron ore and coal, and by far the largest service export. This is great for the country and for the sector but only as long as it doesn’ t become the primary, or worse, sole driver of our international education engagement. And we are perilously close, if not already there. I imagine that we are sincere when we speak of making the quality of Australian education available on the international scale, the intrinsic value of transnational education in a globalised world, the ambassadorial and catalytic roles of our international alumni, and so on. However, the credibility of such assertions would be much greater if we were to also commit a part of the resources that we do to attract students from the countries that can pay, to also proportionately bringing the benefits of Australian education to, for example, sub-Saharan Africa.
To be fair, the universities – in Australia and abroad – have largely, though not always, acted responsibly in managing the international opportunities. The greatest distortions have come from the VET sector, notably the private providers that rushed to take advantage of the associated immigration-lure. Anyone with even the rudimentary knowledge of the economies of the source countries would know that many, if not most, of the international students in such institutions had no chance of earning enough in their trades upon returning home to justify the cost of their training abroad. So, the real intent of such students has to be a shot at immigration, which is a perfectly legitimate aim in itself but let’ s stop pretending otherwise. The universities need to watch out for this distortion because, as the first-movers, we have unwittingly helped to spawn it and we would be collateral casualties if it began to unravel.
At the root of this situation is our government and its policies – or lack thereof – while the universities are largely acting within the context created for them. A government in any society that aspires to be successful assumes a central role in ensuring the adequacy and quality of certain services: health, education, security, infrastructure and so on. Australia has traditionally invested well in what is a top-notch education system. It is first and foremost for this reason that international students flocked to our institutions when the trend began. Sadly, it wasn’ t long before the government started looking to international tuition as a convenient way of abdicating its own responsibility to ensure that the education system stood first and firmly on its domestic feet. The result is that successive governments have been chipping away at the very foundations that made our universities among the best in the world in the first place.
The government’ s misguided obsession with money alone set us on an insidious path where“ education” quickly became an“ export”, thus turning it into a commodity. Today, hardly a ministerial speech begins without the mention of education as our“$ 28 billion export” or something similar. Even on that count, the government has failed the university sector, both in the way it has treated it financially and in the language it uses to justify the treatment. Imagine if Australia’ s automotive industry earned $ 28 billion in export revenue and employed over 100,000 full-time employees! Would the government berate the industry for the“ rivers of gold” flowing into it?
Or let’ s make a more topical comparison. At approximately $ 2 billion a year, our defence exports rank 20th in the world, representing merely 0.3 per cent of the global market. Yet, the government provided a $ 3.8 billion boost to this industry while it simultaneously took away almost an equivalent amount out of the universities that bring over $ 22 billion in export earnings, representing approximately 6 per cent of the global market. They also educate over 1.3 million citizens of Australia and 130 + other countries annually. And I haven’ t even touched on the moral imperatives surrounding the diametrically opposite roles these sectors play for humankind!
Then there’ s the issue of the sustainability of this model, but that’ s for another time.
The choices we make matter and they matter even more in the long run. Language also matters, because the language we use informs the choices we are likely to make. It is time to step back and give both some serious thought. ■
Professor Deep Saini is vice-chancellor at the University of Canberra.
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