Bugsy,
I don't recall ever being asked about overseas students. It is one thing to invite some students from small neighbouring countries but an entirely different matter to turn our UNis into vast commercial enterprizes. The large influx from overseas has ramifacations right throughout the connunity and not all are good things. They are allowed to work and that has an impact on jobs availability. They impact on the rental market, on transport and so on.

Frankly if large countries like China and India can find the money for large militaries and nuclear weapons, I do not see any reason they cannot provide their own education needs. As for skilled immigration, we should be training our own and not poaching the skilled from other poorer countries. Where is the morallity in that.

The changes in Unis have simply been imposed, like high immigration and multiculturalism, we were never properly informed or consulted.

I do not expect community consultation about every little thing the governments do but, I expect proper information be given where the social and economic impacts are to be great. This seems to be one of those issues.

Despite assurances to the contrary, I still see our own students disadvantaged, if for nothing else, due to restricted intake and larger class sizes, etc.

It's always useful to get another perspective
on a topic:

http://www.refugeeaction.org/deportation/Indian.htm

"Indian student billed $97,000 for detention in Baxter."

Banjo
"I don't recall ever being asked about overseas students."
Oh boohoo.
"I do not expect community consultation about every little thing the governments do",
but it sure sounds like it.

Banjo, I think you under a serious misapprehension as to the role of universities in society. They not merely vocational training centres, they are much more than that.

We invite students from all over the world to study at our universities and have always done. This invitation to study is reciprocated by pretty much all other universities around the world. We aren't poaching skilled immigrants from poorer countries, we are training them here. Many of them go home, believe it or not.

The simple policy change that started all of this was widely accepted, and you wouldn't have thought that it was important to you at the time anyway.

And Boazy/Al, I think that if we rely on foreign students for sustainability of our tertiary education institutions is shameful because I don't see any of you blowhards advocating more core funding in the federal and state budgets for research and teaching in the Tertiary education sector. Unis have made up the shortfall by taking in full fee students from overseas and the government has encouraged this by making it an attractive option for the students in order to avoid having to pay more for educating our kids.

Many Australian universities also offer programmes offshore through private providers many of of whom selct students who have not matriuculated into their local universities (e.g. NUS, HKU). These providers compete for the students by offering less challenging VET programmes with the understanding of advanced entry 2nd and 3rd year entry into Australian universities courses, after-which there is pressure on the lecturers to soft mark the students. Private providers also exist within Australia competing against TAFE. The linch-pin in these unsatisfactory arrangements often is commerically driven Faculty Deans. Pehaps, some the problems are founded a few decades ago when CAEs were merged into universities. While some transitions have worked, many have not. Herein, we have senior academics, who were in the right place at the right time, having little, if any, commercial experience and not coming from unverisity (scholarly) earlier careers. Herein, maintaining standards is a challenge, because to address academic issues runs against the goals of international students, deans and the commercial aspirations of the universities.

Many Asians have joint citizenship with Canada and Australia. Others
take on US citizenship. A patriarch will send the childed to these Western countries. Protecting the family and building family wealth would seem to be a prime aspiration overriding nationalistic feelings towards their country of birth or their secondary country.

It always intrigues me when people who obviously know very little about universities pontificate about how they should be run. For example, I doubt very much that either Banjo or Boazy have ever actually studied at one.

Bugsy's quite right of course. For a couple of decades now Australian universities have increasingly been forced to generate income from overseas students, commercial partnerships and fees from domestic students, because successive governments of both persuasions have starved them of funds. In the case of overseas students, this has generally taken the form of an expansion of foreign enrolments that have always constituted a proportion of the overall student intake.

Under such commercialism, there undoubtedly have been cases where some universities have come under pressure to 'dumb down' courses for their fee-paying 'customers', but that applies equally to domestic students. I vividly recall the changed attitudes of Australian students back in the early 90s when HECS was introduced - there was an apparent sense of entitlement to pass subjects for which students would have to pay fees, even though many were just not up to scratch.

I also recall suggesting to more than one such student that they should perhaps take up a trade, rather than pursue a university course for which they were not equipped.

On the subject of vocational education, there clearly has been a fair amount of rorting by some of the shonky 'colleges' that sprang up over the past decade or so. However, I think that much of that is a product of the idiotic nexus between studying (anything apparently) in Australia and permanent residency, which was just a recipe for corruption.

P.S. Boazy - what on earth does your silly rant about unions have to do with the topic?