Student caps highlight ‘halfway house’ role for branch campuses

One of Australia’s first offshore university campuses will strengthen its role as a “halfway house” for international students, amid ongoing anti-migration policies Down Under.

Monash University Malaysia plans to repackage its course offerings and gear its marketing towards overseas students prepared to complete at least part of their degrees on Australian soil.

The idea was spurred by the federal government’s proposed international enrolment caps, which did not apply to students undertaking at least 40 per cent of Australian qualifications offshore.

While the caps proposal was scuttled by the opposition’s last-minute decision to vote against it, educational administrators doubt that the idea has gone away. The government remains committed to limiting overseas student numbers, and opposition leader Peter Dutton has pledged “deeper cuts”.

Monash Malaysia chief executive Adeeba Kamarulzaman said that while her institution would never be merely a staging house for Australia, the prospect of caps had accelerated plans to refashion the campus as part of a University of California-style network.

“We’re an integral part of Monash University,” she said. “Even before the caps [were proposed] we were already thinking: how can Monash best leverage Monash Malaysia? What else can we do within the rules? Discussions on the caps have made us…examine how we can have a system that’s a win-win for everybody.”

The details of any forthcoming capping proposal are yet to be revealed. “That’s why there needs to be different models…which is what we’re working on,” Professor Kamarulzaman said. “We have to think of all the different permutations and combinations that will adhere to the rules.”

Monash Malaysia’s vice-president for education, Stephen Boyle, said packaged offerings of bachelor’s and master’s degrees were appealing.

Under the dormant caps proposal, successive Australian qualifications would have been treated as one programme. Consequently, a foreign student who completed three years of a five-year bachelor’s and master’s package, for example, would not have counted towards the cap.

Professor Boyle said Monash Malaysia had long enabled local students to transfer to Australia, but it had not been at the “forefront of thinking”. The government’s proposal had changed that.

Campus resources on internationalisation in higher education

“Even though the caps [are] on the back burner for now…there could be an alternative at some point. How do we future-proof what we’re doing by really investing in places like our campus here in KL? How do we build programmes of the future that…allow for articulation?”

He said the focus would be on disciplines with a “value proposition” in studying in both countries, such as international business or sub-branches of engineering.

Professor Boyle said he suspected that other universities were thinking along similar lines, as the crackdown on international students sapped life from Australian campuses still depleted by Covid.

Institutions with branch campuses would be considering their potential as “leverage” to repopulate home campuses. “You build up a business model based on certain numbers of students,” he said.

Professor Kamarulzaman said Monash’s operations planned to “go to market together”, collectively recruiting students to a networked university rather than “individual entities”.

While Monash Malaysia is the most established of the university’s offshore campuses, the youthful Monash Indonesia – just 1,200km away – lies in a country with more than 280 million people. “We have to think as a group [or] we will start cannibalising each other,” Professor Kamarulzaman warned.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com