Universities make billions from international students; they will be in trouble if they don’t. There are two ways to protect their revenue streams. One is to convince all of us that the industry is good for universities, the students and the community. The other is to accept the reality of the election, where foreign student numbers was an issue and focus on sceptical voters who wonder if there is anything in the industry for them. They need to do both.
George Williams gets the need to make a case. Writing in The Australian last week, the vice-chancellor of Western Sydney University pitched international education as an unalloyed good. Their fees fund improved education for Australian students. They do jobs locals won’t, in supermarkets and aged care. They don’t push up real estate prices – they can’t afford western Sydney prices for a start. And while some are allowed to stay, most go home “with goodwill towards Australia that pays long-term dividends”.
All true, but a big part of the universities’ case is that international student fees fund the national research effort. They have a problem: new research from the University of Melbourne’s Frank Larkins reveals the number of full-time equivalent Australians working on doctorates at the Group of Eight research universities fell 2 per cent in the decade to 2023. But international candidates were up 42 per cent. Locals weren’t being excluded – small scholarships and uncertain employment after graduation reduced demand – but, then again, universities could spend more to attract locals.
The obvious question is why bother when there is plenty of international demand. And across all study categories there is a heap.
Last year fee-paying international students paid the University of Sydney $1.6bn, 40 per cent of its total income. But universities generally prefer to be judged on their results when variable investment earnings and income tied to specific purposes is excluded. On that basis, the university was in the hole for $68m. Melbourne University received just under $1.2bn from international students, 30 per cent plus of all-up earnings – and still recorded an underlying deficit of $99m.
Scary numbers – cut international student income by 20 per cent and both would be looking at what courses to cut – which would not be good for local students. The same applies at many of the other 30 or so public universities, plus way smaller private colleges that depend on international students.
It’s a case universities have made loud and long since the government and opposition got into competitive quota setting for international enrolments before the election. Universities and their lobby groups ran the standard line that their research and graduates kept the economy afloat and they would sink first without international student fees.
The community responded with indifference, when it was not antipathy. The International Education Association of Australia ran market research in western Sydney and regional Queensland for a social media campaign and heard from people in focus groups who thought international students took jobs, university places and rental housing away from young Australians.
It’s not just here; the other big players in the international education industry are tightening access in response to public opinion.
Britain proposes tougher visa requirements at individual universities, a levy on enrolments and a reduction in post-study work rights. The Canadians reduced international arrivals by 40 per cent in 2024. The government states the caps are intended to “help ease the strain on housing, health care and other services”.
In the US, Donald Trump is governing with the consistency of Caligula, but while announcements about international student enrolments keep changing, they are collateral damage in his campaigns against elite universities in particular and undocumented immigrants in general.
All up, Albanese government attempts to administratively contain arrivals at around pre-Covid levels is relatively benign.
Suspicion of globalism, a fear that free trade in goods and services destroys jobs and a belief that free movement of people erodes cultures are common across the four. The problem for the international education industry is that “Make (insert nation) Great Again” manifests in anecdotes that are hard to rebut.
The idea that there are so many international students they push up rental prices applies – but only in a few inner-city areas in Sydney, Melbourne and, believe it or not, Adelaide. There is evidence for the assumption that international students are really here to work, preferably forever, but such rorting has been going on for years at the bottom end of the private training sector and the federal skills regulator is (finally) on to it.
But universities need to step up and address community concerns, some furphies, some that can pass for facts about the way universities rely on international students. It is not easy.
Last August, there was wide media reporting that an economics class with mainly Chinese students at Melbourne University was taught in Mandarin. There was never a formal complaint to the university which always makes clear that English is its language of instruction. But there is a convention in the business faculty that if international students start discussions in their own language the tutor must bring everybody back to English.
Which is not going to convince critics that Chinese students are fitting into the system rather than universities adjusting for them.
The problem for universities is they went flat out expanding their businesses without considering how it looked to outsiders.
Larkins also has crunched 10-year overall enrolment statistics for Go8 capital city universities. He found domestic students there dropped from 74 per cent of enrolments to 67 per cent.
The change is more pronounced at the highest reputation east coast city campuses. Sydney University reports international students make up 37 per cent of undergraduates, “appropriate for a global university like ours”. Include postgraduates and the figure becomes 47 per cent due to the popularity of a “small number of programs” (they probably mean business coursework masters degrees). International students appear even more dominant because they spend time on campus – it is why they came to Australia. In contrast, locals fit study between work and life.
This may well be why international students were positive about student support/services and “peer engagement” in the most recent published Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching national survey, 10 per cent higher on both than locals.
There is a general sense that locals and international students generally rub along all right on campus. This could be easily confirmed by universities surveying international and local students about their interactions, publishing results and fixing problems. But surveying their own students does not appear to have struck any as worth the effort or risk.
There is certainly one area where there is anecdotal evidence of campus tensions: study. For years social media has been awash with complaints about international students not speaking good-enough English and relying on soft marking to pass. One issue that keeps coming up is that international students do not pull their weight in group assignments, thus risking everybody else’s marks.
The easy answer for universities is to blame all this on racism. They have a point; the idea that “cultural factors” mean students from some countries want to be told what to write by their lecturers or will free-ride in class assumes stereotypes of nationality. It also assumes Australian students are culturally homogenous and start university academically prepared. Both stopped being so when university stopped being for an academic elite.
But ignoring community suspicion that the existing education model puts cash before quality will only convince people who want fewer international students that it does.
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