Australian Catholic University bets the house on its international students’ ongoing fees

ACU Vice Chancellor Zlatko Skrbis.

The Australian Catholic University released its annual report earlier this month, delivering the mother of all Hail Marys to stave off another year with a haemophilic balance sheet.

Saddled with a $35.7m deficit (of his own making), Vice Chancellor Zlatko Skrbis appears to have pulled off a mighty turnaround story worthy of a Netflix franchise: he’s cleared the losses, rebalanced the budget and handed down a respectable surplus of $38.3m. Not even Seabiscuit could pull off a comeback so sweet.

Skrbis, in his usual blurb at the front of the report, attributed this stunning success to a jump in foreign student numbers. Their fees amounted to $121m – a 51.6 per cent increase on the previous year and clearly the motor-force behind the university’s $77.4m growth in total revenue.

“We attracted all-time high student enrolments, with international enrolments at historic levels, enriching our campus and classroom cultures, and contributing to our financial resilience,” Skrbis said.

We’ll grant Skrbis some giddiness over his accomplishment, but pretending that international students – the most volatile cohort of enrolments across the university sector – are some kind of financial bulwark on the balance sheet is, frankly, delusional. There’s nothing safe about international student fees; you’d sooner rely on Ginger McKenna to bring you in the money.

To even suggest as much ignores the simple truth that foreign students are incredibly fickle. They stop turning up when visa fees are tweaked, when interest rates go up, when the government suddenly decides that everyone needs to significantly improve their English – or know all eight verses of Khe Sanh and recite Don Bradman’s batting average if they want a stamp in their passport at Kingsford Smith.

Or when the Albanese government moves to place an arbitrary cap on foreign student enrolments, as it attempted in parliament last year, and which Labor may yet try to reprise following its swaggering election victory and increased body count in the Senate.

Were that to happen, international enrolments at ACU would drop by approximately 945 places, risking about $25m in fees and the rump of that much-vaunted surplus that Skrbis keeps touting.

And that’s to say nothing of the $13.8m in spotters’ fees and commissions that ACU paid last year to offshore agents (of uncertain repute) for the service of finding kids on the international market to study at ACU.

In other words, melting down the family silver to lubricate a revenue stream that the government is unapologetically trying to curtail and, in lieu of a flat-out cap, has imposed Ministerial Direction 111 to drastically slow down visa screenings for incoming foreign students.

It may well be a short-lived surplus for Skrbis, but you can be sure, for now, the VC will cherish it.