Radio Brisvaani
SYDNEY — The campuses of Australia’s busiest universities in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are alive with the sounds of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers, reflecting the attraction Australia has for overseas students from China.
Eight of Australia’s most prestigious universities regularly win a place among the world’s top 100 university rankings, thanks to an intense focus on research. Those high rankings translate into a rich revenue stream from 440,000 international students – more than a third of them Chinese – seeking the status that comes with qualifications from an elite global education institution.
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But now Australian officials are increasingly voicing concern over that pot of gold. A possible over-reliance on China to supply international students may be leaving Australia vulnerable to any shifts in relations between Canberra and Beijing, officials here say. Additionally, there is a view here that some universities may be placing their academic reputations at risk because of lowering their course standards to suit their dominant clientele’s English abilities.
The worries underscore the increasingly important role that international students play in countries’ higher education industries, and how those students can affect universities’ reputations, a key tool used to recruit students.
Globally, the number of international students is growing, fueling competition between countries’ universities to tap into the lucrative sector. The U.S. attracts by far the greatest number of international students, but has seen a recent decline. No. 2 United Kingdom has seen its numbers of international students stagnate as Canada and Australia have moved into the third and fourth spots, largely because of wooing more students from China.
China is the largest source of tourists in Australia, and many Chinese business families have invested in property, particularly in the favored cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. China also is by far Australia’s biggest trade partner, $83.5 billion ($116 billion AUD) of goods and services in the 2017 calendar year, covering vast quantities of iron ore, coal, gas and other commodities.
Australia has been so successful in wooing Chinese students that education ranks as the country’s No. 1 services export to China, worth about $7 billion in 2017. This year, more than 154,000 Chinese are studying at Australia’s 33 public and three private universities. The next biggest source country is India, with 53,000.
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The Chinese presence is especially pronounced at top Sydney educational institutions such as the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, where more than 70 percent of the international students are from China.
New South Wales Auditor General Margaret Crawford, in her annual financial audit of the state’s 10 universities released earlier this year, warned there was a “clear concentration risk” of students from China. Crawford said universities that are not well diversified will be “more sensitive” to political and economic changes in the source countries, and their revenues could suffer as a consequence.
Overseas student revenue in New South Wales ($2 billion in 2017) already outstrips domestic revenue ($1.5 billion) by 35 percent. Twice in the past 12 months, China has issued “safety warnings” to students in Australia, raising questions of how much an impact a sustained warning campaign could have on student numbers.
At a national conference on university governance in October, University of Queensland Vice-Chancellor Peter Varghese said there was nothing inherently wrong with having a large percentage of overseas students from China. Varghese, previously a top diplomat as secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said those students had proven to be the “easiest answer” to the budget pressures facing Australian universities.
However, he identified two threats: The huge investments China is making in its own higher education system, and the future character of China’s political system in its quest to become the predominant power in Asia. Managing China ties against the backdrop of Australia’s key security alliance with the U.S. will be a significant challenge.
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So long as demand remains high, Varghese said, Australian universities should not ignore the lucrative Chinese student revenue stream. Instead, he urged universities to invest their China profits into a future fund to offset any abrupt shifts in international students.
Still, worries remain over the possible damage to universities’ reputations. Earlier this fall, academic demographers Dr. Bob Birrell and Dr. Katharine Betts, head and deputy head respectively of the independent Australian Population Research Institute, issued a report asserting that Australian universities, particularly the top eight, known as the Group of Eight (Go8), are vulnerable to “reputational damage” because they have had to adjust their teaching and assessments to match the lower English-language skills of Chinese students at the graduate level.
Birrell said most Go8 overseas students earned two-year master’s degrees, mainly in business and commerce. He said the Go8 catered primarily to Chinese students whose English-language skills were weak. He said claims by the Go8 that these students were well trained were “not credible,” pointing to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing what he said was a “weak performance” in the Australian labor market by Chinese male graduates in management and commerce.
The Go8, made up of the Australian National University in Canberra and the universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Queensland (in Brisbane), Western Australia (in Perth), New South Wales (in Sydney) and Monash (in Melbourne), reject the report’s claim. Go8 chief executive Vicki Thomson said recently overseas students would have stopped coming to Australia long ago if the educational experience was perceived as low-quality.
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Officials at Universities Australia, a nonpartisan organization that serves the interests of the country’s higher education institutions, also reject any lowering of standards. In an interview, UA Chief Executive Catriona Jackson says quality is fundamental to the sector’s success, pointing to a recent survey that showed 90 percent of overseas students were satisfied with the quality of their study experience in Australia.
Birrell said revenue from overseas students subsidized the Go8’s research activities, which in turn were the basis for the Go8’s success in international rankings.
U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Melbourne as the top Australian university, at No.26, followed by the University of Sydney at No. 31, Queensland at No. 42, Monash at No. 62 and Australian National University at No. 66. The University of NSW comes in at No. 70, followed by Western Australia at No. 81. The University of Adelaide, the final member of the Go8, sits just outside the Top 100 at No. 102.
Australia has a deep and complex economic, cultural and political relationship with China. More than 1.2 million of Australia’s 25 million people are of Chinese origin – the first migrant from South China arrived in 1818, just 30 years after the first Europeans settled in Sydney.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2018-12-10/how-international-students-are-changing-australias-universities?context=amp&fbclid=IwAR1wEIp4g8q1RJEvq05MEK4C5FKwRZ0VeuPZPpB11LbONeCF0nqnq4gG_zU
