Border closures cause international students to look elsewhere

Navitas, one of the nation’s biggest education companies, has raised the alarm on the future of the international student business.

International students are turning their backs on Australia, according to a new global survey.

Navitas, one of the nation’s biggest education companies, has raised the alarm on the international student industry with a new survey showing that interest in Australia as an education destination is plummeting.

The company’s March 2021 global survey of 900 education agents — who place students into universities and colleges around the world — shows that Canada and the UK have surged way ahead of Australia in their appeal to international students.

Even the US, whose reputation was in the doldrums under Donald Trump has seen its reputation forge ahead of Australia’s since Joe Biden was elected.

READ MORE:Education exports could halve | Unis cook the books | UNSW escapes big COVID loss | John Dewar to head Universities Australia |

The Navitas Agent Perception Report said a key difference between countries such as the US, Canada and the UK (whose reputations rose since the previous survey on September 2020) and countries whose reputations fell (such as Australia and New Zealand) is that the latter have closed borders with little to no prospect of opening themthis year.

The report said that while Australia and New Zealand “continue to be perceived as ‘safe and stable’ due to their (COVID) elimination strategies and very low case numbers, this perception is increasingly irrelevant to a country’s reputation as a study destination”.

Unlike the previous survey, the latest March 2021 survey showed that students actually showed more interest in countries with a high numbers of COVID cases.

Jon Chew, Navitas head of strategic insights and analytics who authored the report, said there was a disconnect emerging between the way Australians view COVID and the way the rest of the world sees it. “I think, by the next survey, it will not matter how many cases there are in the eyes of students,” he said.

The survey showed that students were gravitating towards countries where borders were viewed as more likely to be open for the next student intake.

It found that only 4 per cent of education agents believed students would almost certainly be able to travel to Australia and New Zealand later this year, while around 40 per cent believed the same of the UK and Canada.

The report predicted that, with Joe Biden now president, the US was “poised to reassert its position as the number one study destination for international students globally”.

In contrast, the report said that Australia and New Zealand had become “characterised by their hard border stance with no end in sight”. The two countries would be “spectators, not beneficiaries, of a recovery in global student flows in 2021,” it said.

Meanwhile two new reports from credit rating agency S&P Global Ratings warn that the impact of the loss of international students could be worse for universities this year than in 2020.

“Because tertiary degrees are usually at least two years in duration (and some exceed five or six), a diminished cohort of commencements in one year will have a pipeline effect, depressing revenue in future years, too,” said one report, titled Australian universities go from boom to Zoom.

The report also voiced fears that education could be the next sector to suffer restrictions impose by China in its trade dispute with Australia.

S&P said the loss of international students would have a major impact on universities.

“Enrolments and staff numbers will shrink, and curriculum offerings will be reshaped,” says the other report, titled Australian university finances under COVID-19: Degrees of discomfort.

It also warned the impact would vary across universities and lead to strong competition for international students which the prestigious universities were likely to win. “If student demand wanes, they (the higher ranked universities) could tweak their fees or entry standards to cannibalise demand from lower-ranked peers,” it said.