Doubts over the safety of the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine for those under 50 now mean that Australia will not be able to vaccinate its population, and achieve herd immunity, until next year.
And the reality is that governments — federal and state — are not prepared to take what they see as the political risk of having large numbers of students arrive before herd immunity is achieved in the Australian population.
Every month that students are unable to return to Australia means more value being wiped off what was, pre-COVID, a $40bn annual revenue export industry.
And, in case a reminder is needed, most of this money did not go to universities and other education providers — it went to businesses providing food, accommodation, travel, entertainment and the other goods and services consumed by more than 700,000 international students.
If students can’t return at the beginning of 2022, it will be the third consecutive year that first-semester arrivals have been interrupted by the pandemic. “Two years is bad enough, but a third year is diabolical,” says International Education Association of Australia CEO Phil Honeywood.
Australia’s main competitor countries — the US, the UK and Canada — are letting students in. And the stopgap measures being used by Australian universities to enrol new students — such as having them study online with the promise of coming to Australia when the border is opened — grow less and less viable.
Many universities have partner education institutions overseas that teach students for one to two years before they come to Australia to complete their degrees. Many of these long-established partnerships are endangered, says Honeywood.
NSW has a plan to bring in up to 300 students a week this year under strict quarantine. But even if this plan proceeds, it only brings back the students who urgently need to be here to complete their course — not new students. And without new students, there is a pipeline effect that depresses enrolments for several years.
There is no perfect answer to this problem. But governments can expand current quarantine arrangements to bring in more students, and push for early vaccine passports, which will allow thousands of other students to safely enter.
It only takes the will.
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Universities, independent tertiary education providers and English colleges are facing the hitherto unthinkable — extended border closures, which will prevent the large-scale arrival of international students not only for the rest of this year, but in first semester next year as well.