Forget about Covid for a minute, and the devastation that it caused to international education, which was once Australia’s behemoth, $40bn a year, service export industry. Think back to pre-Covid times, in 2019 when international education was at its peak, coming off the back of an extraordinary expansion.
In 2014 education exports were worth $19.8bn. Five years later, in 2019, they had more than doubled to $40.3bn. It was a gold rush, in which student numbers grew rapidly, and universities raked in ever larger amounts of money to build new buildings and laboratories and hire new researchers. Investment poured into the sector with a boom in student accommodation, and investors couldn’t get enough of education companies.
But when a sector grows this fast, and everyone is swept by enthusiasm, it’s easy for key things to be overlooked.
Some of them are evident in the 2020 International Student Experience Survey, an official study commissioned by the federal government, which was released last week. It is a large-scale annual exercise, carried out by the Australian National University’s Social Research Centre, which gathered nearly 90,000 responses from international students last year. It’s the best insight into what the students think about their experience in Australia during the boom years.
The interesting thing is that their opinion about their undergraduate experience in Australia is remarkably stable. From 2014 to 2019 the proportion that rated their educational experience as positive sat in the narrow range from 74 per cent to 76 per cent.
Then, for obvious reasons, it dropped to 63 per cent last year. All university education in that year was badly affected by the pandemic.
But going back to 2014-19, not only were international students unchanging in their overall view of their Australian education in those years. Their view of all five components that make up the total educational experience also remained stable.
Take them one by one. Skills development was about 80 per cent positive; teaching quality, about 78 per cent; student support, about 71 per cent; learning resources, about 83 per cent. The outlier was learner engagement, stuck down at around 58 per cent and not budging over those six years.
Since learner engagement is the outlier in the survey, the one that is consistently poor, it’s interesting to see what it is defined as.
To measure learner engagement, international students were asked if they felt prepared for study, had a sense of belonging to their institution, participated in discussions, worked with other students in their study, interacted with students outside study, interacted with students who were different from them, and interacted with local students.
A large proportion of international students evidently believed these aspects were substandard. In other words, they missed out on the overseas study experiences that have lasting value: meeting new people, making lifelong friendships in a different culture, and enjoying class discussion as an integral part of learning.
The alarming thing is that, across six years, this measure did not change. Whatever was done by universities to try to improve it had no impact. And remember these were the boom years of international education when resources to solve a fundamental problem like this should have been able to be found.
When students do finally return to Australia – which given the politics of the situation is not likely until after next year’s federal election – universities need to have a new and more effective strategy to engage international students.
Partly it’s what the students are owed when they travel to another country and pay high fees for what should be a high-quality education experience. They should go home with a set of lifelong friends and feeling that their period of study in Australia was personally worthwhile. Studying in Australia should not be a lonely experience.
But partly it’s also for us.
One of the benefits to Australia of hosting international students is the exposure it gives our young people to their peers in other countries. We want them to interact, to mix and create ties that will last them through life. It also builds an Australia that grows in its understanding of its neighbours, that is more ready to engage with the world and that is a richer place – both materially and spiritually.
To be fair, it’s not a simple problem to solve. But one thing that would help is to avoid repeating the mistake of concentrating international students into business degrees where they study with each other. Universities also have to help local students to see international students as assets to their education, and certainly not as people to avoid doing group assignments with.
Success won’t be easy; it will take a lot of work. But on the upside, it could lead to Australia’s business of hosting international students being much more than just money.
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