Sounds like a good idea but it's a tough ask if only one in two of the locals are up for more international students. We still haven't come to terms with racism in this country, which bubbles just below the surface.

I doubt Adelaideans understand the importance of international education to revenue streams. It would be a pissant backwater if the students left.

Well I guess Adelaide & higher education go well together.

Just as higher education has become a leach, sucking the blood out of much of the rest of the community, Adelaide is also a leach on the rest of Oz.

Without pinching the water it uses from Queensland, NSW & Vic, neither the city, nor the states agriculture could exist.

Without pinching money from the resource states, Adelaide & the whole state could not exist.

I guess the higher education community & South Australia/Adelaide have much in common

Cheryl is right there is still is a great deal of racism in Australia who can read it clearly in her post. Her clear self loathing would indicate she comes from Adelaide but now lives in Melbourne.

SA Uni's may be going great guns as far as international students. what it is failing badly at is supply a work force to the mining and It sectors.

The campuses outside of Adelaide are a joke and the ones in Adelaide are not much better. I regularly have to recruit interstate and international because we cannot find job ready grads from South Australia ready to work in the mining sector.

I manage a large IT development and support group in the North of the state yet I've never been approached by any university about what we need.

This article is similar to the boosterish crap we have to listen to in Adelaide's Murdoch-dominated media all the time. Telling us how wonderful everything could be if only the stick-in-the-mud Adelaideans would stop getting in the way. The truth is that very little comes of their dreams and ideas becase they are often totally unrealistic and are against the desire of most Adelaideans who actually love their city and the way that it is NOT like overcrowded and oversized Sydney and Melbourne. So some business community "leaders" are constantly whinging in the Murdoch press about our attitudes when really they should be looking themselves in the mirror and asking what their problem is. The simple solution for them - if they love Sydney and Melbourne so much - is to move there!

The reason why an increase in student numbers is not popular in Adelaide is because the very rapid population growth here is destroying the very "liveability" that the current residents find so attractive. The locals see how low quality highrise is being pushed on inner-city suburbs in the name of "student accommodation" and how all of the hairdressing and cookery students who arrived are now filling the hospitals and competing for other services.

The truth of the foreign-university in Adelaide idea is that it has been a complete flop and a waste of tax money. The deepening economic crisis in the USA and Europe will impact further on Chinese exports and reduce the capacity of the Chinese and others in Asia to support the student fees charged by the universities. We are seeing the end of the impossible idea of continuous "sustainable growth" in the university sector. The inevitable contraction phase will prove very difficult for many Australian universities.

By the way Malcolm, it's "University of Adelaide", not "Adelaide University.

I would politely suggest that international students are needed to save us from the type of thinking that Michael in Adelaide proposes.

Over population? You could throw a bulldozer down King William Street at peak hour and not hit a soul. Indeed, the reactive enviro/heritage lobby aims to keep Adelaide locked in to 1949... here comes Bob Menzies, up go the trade walls.

I suggest international students come to Adelaide to introduce it to modern thinking, to create new avenues for trade, because God only knows, the City of Churches is going to need much more diversity than mining and sheep.

It's odd that a city that promotes itself on liberalism and tolerance is so backward when it comes to international students. It's like Alabama in the early 60s. Mercifully, it has the other states to help it along.

Cheryl, how many decades has it been since you were last in Adelaide....

Yes Hasbeen I was as out raged as you When south Australia put in the irrigation channel from Queensland to south Australia. Why some people call it a river is beyond me.

Reality and hasbeen are not well acquainted.

I’m sure you were even more outraged Kenny, when South Oz built a barrage/dam across the mouth of that ditch, generating the largest fresh water playground, & irrigation canal in the country, then demanded that the eastern states give up their water, & stop irrigated farming, just so you could fill it with their water.

I’m not that much a fan of SA wines that I’m prepared to go along with that idea.

Perhaps it’s something to do with being a university town that helps you convince the greenies that the huge pond so generated is natural, & should be protected with the blood of thousands.

Some things to consider:

What if the majority of people of Adelaide don't WANT to live in a 'university city'? Just a thought.

Furthermore, a university city along the lines of Oxford or Princeton doesn't become a university city by building lots of competing universities. It becomes a university city by having one world-class institution.

Scanning through the staff profiles of various universities, it does certainly appear that many of the staff, if not most, are newly arrived immigrants.

I am wondering how much the universities are now for the benifite of newly arrived immigrants and foregin students, and just how much does Australia get out of it.

I am also wondering about a figure of 8 million I have recently seen, the recommended number of people who could live in Australia sustainably.

That is, the number of people the environment could sustain.