Australia international education crackdown ‘partly self-created’

International education practitioners have rained misfortune on their own industry by touting its profitability and attracting rent-seekers who elicited a regulatory crackdown, an Australian forum has heard.

“We have…set up this sector as an industry that generates billions of dollars,” higher education researcher Davina Potts told the THE Campus Live ANZ event at the University of Newcastle. “In talking about that, it results in everyone want to get a cut.

“Everyone wants to be in the money. We’ve got profiteers coming into the sector. We have the government wanting their own future fund out of the money that our institutions are spruiking as we talk about how valuable our sector is.”

Dr Potts, head of student recruitment at the University of Melbourne, said educators should stick to their core mission. “We’re not generating export income for our country. We’re transforming the lives of young people. Their families are investing hard-earned…dollars in their future, and that’s not talked about enough in these conversations.”

Nor was the ill-treatment of overseas students that had been “going on for years”, she said. “We have a collective responsibility [in] standing up and saying it’s not okay to exploit our students when they’re in the job market. We are big institutions. It should be part of our social licence to…take a stand on those things, and possibly less of a stand on the politics.”

Dr Potts said the sector had scored an “own goal” by “lobbying” instead of working quietly to fix problems such as abuse of and by students.

She said universities had limited capacity to manage integrity issues, which had exploded after international students were granted unlimited work rights and new technologies made identity fraud commonplace. Nevertheless, “having this fight with our politicians in public” was no solution.

“We could be activating our networks more productively to be problem-solving around some of these things and taking collective responsibility for the issues – [and] being less polite to our colleagues when something’s not right,” she said.

Newcastle deputy vice-chancellor Kent Anderson said the sector had dropped the ball in not maintaining the fight against abuse of students by employers and landlords – something it had been “getting pretty good at” before the pandemic. And it had erred in shrugging off concerns about international students’ impacts on university classes and community infrastructure.

“We didn’t take responsibility for things,” he told the forum. “It is very easy to say these policies are wrong because those people in Canberra [are] ignorant or those people out in the western suburbs are racist. It’s much harder to listen to what they’re saying about the lived experience of our students, both international and domestic.”

He said Australian parents often complained that high concentrations of international students in university classes were undermining their children’s education. “We need to go back and see whether the student experience is compromised and deal with that.

“We…have to start off with domestic student experience. If we’re compromising domestic student experience to service international, I have a problem with that. I also have a problem if we compromise international student experience to serve domestic. Let’s start with student experience and doing that really well.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com