Let’s not be tossers to our foreign students. Looking at you, Randwick

There’s a lot wrong with how we treat international students in this country, but I never expected to see Randwick Council picking on the young and vulnerable. Privileged tossers.

Let’s wait to see how they respond when they discover UNSW is not only planning on building more international student accommodation but also towers of affordable housing for local students. Rightly, this Group of Eight university wants to attract more students from backgrounds which don’t normally rock up to Kensington.

The UNSW student accommodation proposal would include a small public square near the light rail station on Anzac Parade.

Yes, it’s true that the federal government is using international students as pawns in the war on tertiary education or at least the war on funding higher education. But it’s not just the federal government which treats these students appallingly – the disrespect now appears at the lowest rung of government. The councillors and whining residents of Randwick should count themselves very lucky. By building accommodation and filling them with international students, UNSW secures a future for all students with an institution which will then have enough money to run universities as they should be run. That’s funding across the three key areas of higher education: teaching, research and public engagement.

We already treat international students appallingly. The vice-chancellor of UNSW Attila Brungs was formerly my boss at UTS, yet he resolutely refused my requests for an interview with him, the ratbag. But I’m sure he remembers me telling him nearly 20 years ago one of my first year journalism students found eight international students sharing a two-bedroom apartment, one forced to sleep on the balcony.

Housing is a killer for these students – and also for our local students. I’ve had a sniff around UNSW and discovered that it also has plans to build much more student accommodation, for both international and local students. Those Randwick councillors complaining about the “Anzac Parade corridor” should have good look at themselves – and realise that thoroughfare is no Parisian boulevard.

The hectare-sized site, owned by the University of NSW, is currently a car park opposite the university’s main entrance.Credit: Janie Barrett

My own experience of teaching international students was frustrating. Here were kids far from home who wanted to succeed – but rarely had good enough English to do that. Plus they had to deal with stuck-up locals who think it’s not their job to practise English with international students – and who definitely don’t want to do group work with someone whose English isn’t as good as theirs (local students think they speak and write perfectly. If only).

Andrew Norton, professor of the practice of higher education policy at ANU, says we don’t really know enough about international students in Australia, but we do know this. Their English needs to be better to function well in a classroom setting. We rely on international students to fill labour gaps. And their fees fund research while governments don’t.

“Universities have to fill that gap,” he says.

Here’s my own pitch – one I tried to sell to the university where I worked. Accept students for the course – but rearrange it so that the first year is entirely about learning to speak, read and write in English. Encourage social interactions with others – tell clubs university funding will only continue if they recruit and retain international student engagement. Insist every group assignment includes one international student in a group and reward those groups who make it work.

That’s what it’s like in real life – you end up working with the easy and the difficult, but you make it work because that’s what you are paid for. Brungs has made a lot of changes at UNSW already which incorporate some of these ideas – but that’s not true of universities across the nation.

And we need to remind our own students that when they do exchange (and my god, they are desperate to do exchange) they are dead keen to fit in and have fun. This is a two-way street.

Gaby Ramia’s new book, International student policy in Australia: the welfare dimension, is set to come out in October. Ramia, a professor of policy and society at the University of Sydney, reminds me that international students struggle here. They don’t get access to Medicare. They don’t get access to transport concessions. When they work, they are taxed at the same rate as local students who are more likely to live at home and may have access to welfare. Maybe we should means test travel concessions for eastern suburbs students.

International students are second class citizens who pay extra for the privilege of coming here and get treated badly along the way. Ramia says France and Germany do an excellent job of dealing with international students – and we should catch up: transport concessions, Medicare and decent housing ASAP.

And what does Ramia say about the way universities treat international students?

“Governments create the market that is international education and not surprisingly, universities become market players because that’s how they need to behave.”

Australia opened its doors to mass international student enrolments since the early 1990s and our universities have reaped the benefits of that. We’ve opened our doors but not our hearts. Maybe Randwick councillors could do an exchange themselves. Let’s send them all to Beijing and see how they cope.

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.