ANU offers free semester online to stranded Chinese students

ANU is offering a free semester’s study online to students who remain stranded by the coronavirus travel ban.

As the COVID-19 outbreak rages in China, the Australian National University tries to lock in its new Chinese students with a generous scholarship offer. Photo:AFP

In a bold stroke that will maximise the chances of hanging on to commencing students stranded in China, the Australian National University is offering a free semester’s study online for those who do not make it to campus in time.

The university has about 700 students due to start courses this semester who are unable to enter Australia because of the coronavirus travel ban.

If they can’t arrive before the end of next month the university will offer them a “hardship scholarship” that will allow them to complete a full study load for the first semester at no cost.

If all 700 international students currently eligible for the scholarship took it up it would cost the university about $14m.

Commenting on the scholarship offer, ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt said the university’s prime goal was to “keep as many of our students as possible engaged with their learning and our community”.

“From the outset we’ve taken a student-first approach,” he said.

The scholarship will cover normal tuition fees for 650 subjects the university has available online. It will be available to any commencing international student affected by the ban, not just Chinese nationals, an ANU spokesman said.

The March 31 deadline is judged as “the absolute cut-off for students to be able to arrive on campus and take classes without experiencing academic hardship” and coincides with the census date, when enrolments are finalised.

Those who arrive before that time will join classes as usual.

Continuing international students who are delayed by the travel ban are not eligible for the hardship scholarship and will pay tuition fees as normal.

However, ANU is offering them other concessions. Continuing students affected by the ban will have an extra two months (until June 3) to withdraw from their first semester courses without academic or financial penalty. (They will have a “withdrawn without penalty” recorded on their academic transcript.)

Furthermore, if such students fail any course they do in first semester the university will let them repeat it without cost.

International Education ­Associ­ation of Australia president Phil Honeywood said ANU was “to be commended on this first mover initiative” for students affected by the travel ban, particularly as it also had benefits for continuing students. “The challenge is not to have one cohort of students feel that another cohort has been advantaged,” he said.

Universities are particularly concerned that commencing students affected by the travel ban may opt not to study in Australia at all. A survey of 16,000 Chinese students stranded in China by the ban, taken in the days after it was announced, found that one-third of them would enrol in another country if they couldn’t study in Australia this semester.

The survey findings, reported exclusively in The Australian, said the students likely to opt for other countries were mainly coming students who had little to lose by moving elsewhere.

The travel ban is due to be reviewed by the federal government at the end of this week.

But ANU said that because it was uncertain when the ban would be lifted, it would decide its attitude to second semester “in due course”.

“But this will be informed by the general principles of flexibility and generosity,” a spokesman said.

Students were told about the option on Friday, the day after the federal government announced the extension of the travel ban until at least this Saturday.

ANU’s move is likely to prompt other universities to take initiatives to assist Chinese students affected by the travel ban, par­ticularly commencing students.

The University of Sydney spokeswoman said the university was considering a range of options for students affected by the travel ban. It emailed affected students on Tuesday saying it now had 800 study units of online supported learning available for part or all of first semester.