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Deadline looms for universities, foreign students
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews says that throughout the pandemic, a day has felt like a month. Given that, any decision to re-open Australia’s international borders feels a long, long way off.
Yet, if international education is to resume next year, if universities are to regain a crucial source of revenue and the Victorian economy its largest export service, the federal government must quickly declare its intentions.
Monash University vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner says Australian universities, including campuses that have hibernated through Melbourne’s long COVID-19 winter, remain well-placed to attract students from overseas.
Monash University Vice-Chancellor Margaret Gardner says the Federal Government needs to make clear its plans to re-open our international borders.Credit: Jason South
"We have still got a high-quality education system, we have still got a country that is secure," Professor Gardner tells The Age. "It should be a country that is safe in every sense of the word.
"But none of those things make sense unless people can get here. There has to be political will and an agreement and those plans need to be made federally, because the states can’t open international borders."
A cruel aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic in Victoria is the disproportionate impact it has had on the state’s most important exports; education and tourism. Whereas Western Australia can happily sell iron ore from behind closed borders, Victoria can only sell services to people who come here.
In 2018-19, international education contributed $12.6 billion to Victoria's trade. At Monash, nearly four in 10 students came from overseas.
Professor Gardner says the trend at Monash since the onset of the pandemic is clear. Despite concerted efforts to bring foreign students back into the country, enrolments for semester one were significantly down.
Enrolments for semester two were down further still, with some students choosing to return home and not come back.
The forecast for 2021 enrolments is bleak.
Professor Gardner, the acting chair of the Group of Eight universities and a former vice-chancellor of RMIT, spoke to The Age as part of a series of stories in which prominent Melburnians offer constructive ideas about Victoria’s way forward.
She describes the international student market as having a long pipeline. In normal circumstances, many students intending to enrol in a university course next year would already be in Australia studying English, a year 12 equivalence course or another tertiary course.
They aren’t doing that this year.
"We really are talking substantial falls," she says.
Professor Gardner says remote learning has kept some international students enrolled but this is a stopgap, not a solution. "The longer someone is at a distance, unable to have the full experience, how does that feed into people’s willingness to stay with us, to not go home or go somewhere else, or not come to us?"
She says that for universities to welcome international students back next year, the federal government must declare by the end of October a preparedness to let them in. It doesn't need to have a finalised plan; just clear intention to develop one.
"The truth is we need to know quite soon," Professor Gardner says.
"Education is going to be absolutely vital to working out of the situation we are in and I think we have got a good story. We have to be able to have a plan in place that says how we’ll make it possible for you to get to this safe space and have the sort of education you were hoping for."
Professor Gardner says loosening border restrictions would also help local students. At Monash, all bachelor of arts students are guaranteed an overseas study experience in their first year, with the cost built into their university fees. This can be a trip to one of the university’s campuses in Malaysia, China, India and Italy or its planned campus in Indonesia.
Monash was working to expand the program when the pandemic hit. "We don’t want to walk away from that either, but we need our international borders open to do it," Professor Gardner says.
The Morrison government wants the states to open internal borders by Christmas, but so far has not indicated when Australia will open itself to the rest of the world. Professor Gardner says when this happens, first preference must necessarily be given to Australian citizens stuck overseas.
Professor Gardners says that with the right message from Canberra, international education can rebound strongly. Although the Australian economy and particularly the Victorian economy have been tipped into recession, the economic impact has been milder here than in most developed nations. The virus has been relatively well controlled.
At Monash’s student residences, about 3000 students have lived in close quarters and shared communal facilities throughout the pandemic without triggering an outbreak. Surveys of students indicate that although many are under financial distress, they remain positive about their university experience here.
In-person lectures and tutorials, when they return, will be combined with online classes to reduce the number of students on campus at any given time. Professor Gardner says this was already happening prior to the pandemic, with students asked to indicate a preference for how they want to study.
Professor Gardner says that if nothing is done to save international education in Australia, the impact will go well beyond the bottom lines of universities and balance of trade.
"You don’t go back to the world I did my undergraduate degree in,'' she says. "You did not get the diversity, the experience and the richness that I see students get now.''