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The Forum > Article Comments > International education outlook stormy > Comments

International education outlook stormy : Comments

By Steven Schwartz, published 9/6/2010

A 'perfect storm' of negative factors will likely see Australia’s market share of international students decrease over the next decade.

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This is a pretty disastrous situation given that Govt kicks in only 25-40% of a universities revenue. The other 60% has to come from somewhere and foreign students are a useful component of that revenue.
Posted by David Jennings, Wednesday, 9 June 2010 11:21:15 AM
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Fear not chaps, The (self-regulating) Market will re-solve this latest little hitch, and may hopefully even provide a little dollop of bitter education for the men and women in suits with their MBAs and the like who dominate the Education, Immigration and now Austrade bureaucracies.

But then again they have obviously learned very little to date and are, after all, in safe, well-connected, well-rewarded sinecures. So none of this really matters, does it!
Posted by Sowat, Wednesday, 9 June 2010 4:02:54 PM
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It's a great national tragedy that the 'carrot' for overseas students is our national identity.

Offering simple and short courses to overseas students with the promise of PR at the end of it..leading to citizenship, is national betryal and abrogation of fiscal responsibility to properly fund our higher education.

Becoming addicted to this foreign 'revenue stream' at the expense of our national character is the moral equivalent of becoming economically addicted to the slave trade.

I bloke named Esau knows a bit about this. His brother Jacob stripped him of his birthright over a bowl of 'porridge'

Esau returns from a hard day out in the desert looking for game.

Esau..(To Jacob) "Im FAMished.. where's the tucker Jake?"

"I'm doing now bro.. all I want before I give you some is your birthright"

"What good is a birthright to me when my stomach is SCREAMing for food?.. DEAL!"

An old story, but very up to date.
Posted by ALGOREisRICH, Thursday, 10 June 2010 9:18:12 AM
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Vice-Chancellor Professor Schwartz is, of course correct. I would add:

Developing economies in Asia are rapid building thee own high quality universities, supported by huge government and corporate investment (e.g south Korea/ China). Meanwhile, most developed economies seem destined to suffer from lower growth/income, public and private fiscal austerity and currency depreciation/ and or volatility. If Australian can hold our international enrollments we will being doing well indeed.
Posted by Grant Musgrove, Thursday, 10 June 2010 2:13:35 PM
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The vice-chancellor misses an extra element in the perfect storm, which is, almost everythin in the education system in Australia is now imported.

About 100% of educational software and textbooks is now imported (mostly from the US), which means there is nothing unique about Australian education.

Why pay the cost of coming to Australia, pay substantial up front fees, live in substandard accomadation, have to work part time for low wages, put up with mediocre lectures (many of whome are extremely left wing biased, feminist and gender prejuiced), and mostly use imported software and textbooks anyway.

It has now all backfired. The attitude of import, import, import that is rampant throughout the education system means that students can get a university education from 1001 other universities outside of Australia.
Posted by vanna, Saturday, 12 June 2010 8:33:53 AM
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As well as the factors mentioned in Steven Schwartz's article, Australian international education in the next year will start to be effected by the digital education revolution. This will have far more impact that the factors Steven Schwartz lists, including the GFC. Not only are our unis in danger of loosing their overseas students to foreign competition, but their domestic Australian students as well.

Vocational and university teaching methods (and to some extent school education) is being redesigned to make use of the web and the Internet. This allows most education to be done online, without the student needing to attend a class in person. As a result most students will not need to leave home, let alone their country, to get a university or vocational qualification.

The Australian Government, in partnership with state governments and professional bodies, are funding and encouraging this digital education revolution in schools, TAFEs and universities. Educators are well aware of what is happening and are being retrained as part of the process through government programs and infrastructure for them set up with government funding. However, those involved in the business of education do not seem to have yet understood the implications and there has been little work on how it will effect Australian education as a business.

For Australia to remain competitive, it needs to invest where education will be, not where it used to be. Australia needs a business strategy to address the digital education revolution for international education.

Online education is now an everyday reality for some of us in the international education business. I teach students at the postgraduate level around the world online. I have helped set up an internationally accredited program which brings export dollars to Australia, but the rest of the world is catching up: <http://www.tomw.net.au/green/>.

The latest advances in online education will be discussed at the Moodle Moot 2010 in Melbourne in July <http://moodlemoot.org.au/>.
I will be talking on postgraduate professional education with eBooks, iPads and Smartphones: <http://moodlemoot.org.au/course/view.php?id=44>.

ps: "Moodle" is a very popular software package used for online education, which was developed in Australia.
Posted by tomw, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 10:25:14 AM
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