I am for a fair mand tolerant approach to international students and immigration.

But I am not interested in messages that simply support a booming international student market. Do we really want numbers to increase and increase until they reach a significant proportion of our total education numbers in the university sector?

Some policies should be about common sense, not merely about how many dollars we earn.

As Bob Birrell would highlight, there are many other consequnces which are not as easily measured in dollar terms.

Dilan - here's a newsflash. Foreign students are meant to come, get educated AND LEAVE. We don't want them to "come back".

Also, most academics realise that the foreign student boom cannot last - as nations develop they can develop their own educational systems. The decline in the US dollar and the troubles with public funding of universities there mean that they are also now out to get "our" foreign students and we may have difficulty competing (although students will be far safer here than there).

Australian universities were forced by government policy to become far too dependent on foreign students and we will now pay the price. The bubble is bursting and universities will need to downsize to appropriate levels. Continuous growth in ANY sector of the economy is just not possible.

Stop whinging Dilan and, instead, thank your lucky stars that you have managed to get established here while the going was good.

"If you were a parent sitting in an Asian country would you use your hard-earned savings and send the apple of your eye off to study in Australia?"

Why wouldn't I be asking why my own country can't deliver what I and my family need?

Why is there an expectation that someone else should pick up the problem, and then deliver it to my satisfaction or by golly I'll write some snippy letters and articles pointing out what they are doing wrong.

Finger wagging is not going to solve this.

Do we need this foreign student industry? Do we need to churn the children of foreigners who tut-tut and criticize us, when their own countries are clearly sub standard?

We had an education industry before the foreigners became more affluent and arrogantly decided their own countries education system was not good enough for their little precious cargoes and started to shop around.

Sure, some education facilities have geared up to this and will have to cut back, but that's business - they have over capitalized, it's not an unusual business issue.

We'll survive without the spoiled children of pompous critics and their ilk.

I'm more than happy for this industry to be cut back severely, it brings little but trouble for the community, and it is being misused as an immigration channel. Do these pampered children go back to the countries who cannot even be bothered providing decent education facilities.

It's not a business we should be in at all.

Amicus - Um.... why do so many Australians keep going off to study overseas? Because just like Asians they view an overseas education as valuable.

The author is correct in pointing out that Australian students will lose out. The Australian has said today that under the Libs HECS would rise by 10%.

jj - Australians don't go off overseas to countries who have education farms the way we do, all countries who have a reasonable education system have foreign students - the article is referring to the "business" of educating foreigners as apart to a few foreigners joining our system

I work near a large university, I can tell you in the morning the waves of young people heading to the uni from all the PT is exclusively Asian, or from the sub continent. The buildings are new and were built to service this market niche.

It's not as if they are just fitting in like the rest of the students there - this was built for the foreign trade.

Now when I go to a foreign uni in Europe, USA or Japan, I don't see special facilities being built for this "industry".

It is as michael_in_adelaide says, in Australia, a bubble.

Perhaps I didn't express myself well enough in my post above - I'm not against students traveling or being educated overseas - I'm irritated at being lectured and having someone wag their finger at us for not meeting their standards of what they expect Australia to provide just because right now they are cashed up and can't be bothered changing the systems in their own countries but expect us to run around making sure all their little darlings are happy.

Australia is not a completely safe place, we do not enforce laws very well, we do not have enough police - that's just how it is.

So they can afford to send their kids here, but then their kids seem to have to work to survive .. how does that affect their studies, sure lots of people work and study, we all did it - but with the sub continent in particular, they seem to come here with additional requirements of us.

Amicus, Dilan was born in Australia as he said in a previous article.

Have you actually see any of the universities overseas? If not, how do you know that they don't educate large numbers of foreign students? And why is it surprising that the two countries with the world's largest populations, India and China, don't have enough universities to educate their own people.

Lots of Australian students also work and study at the same time. If the money that the foreign students bring in goes then their lives will get a lot harder. Birrell's idea of getting rid of the foreign students and educating only Australian students is facile wishful thinking.