The nominated purpose of the federal government’s legislated cuts to international student enrolments in Australian universities took only a day to fall over. So, what is really going on?
Where to begin?
Maybe, way back in 1987, when the Dawkins reforms savagely cut the funding per student and instructed universities that they needed to operate like businesses and find new sources of income.
Or perhaps, in the late 1990s, when the Howard government cut university funding by 18% over a five year period and told them, again, they had to find ways of meeting the funding shortfall themselves.
Or, over that decade or so, the universities’ substantial investments in the recruitment and teaching of international students. Some universities, particularly those offering an MBA, even created purpose-built, ‘premium’ facilities for their internationals — thoroughly pissing off the domestics who were stuck back in economy.
This is when we start to see the steady trickle of academic whistleblowers complaining about the questionable entry standards for English evident in their international cohorts, the pressure placed upon university teachers to award passing grades to underperforming international students, and the flat out venality displayed by some universities and other providers in chasing international fee income.
Notwithstanding such problems, even as recently in 2015, the federal government expressed their unbridled enthusiasm for building the international education industry to the max. At that time, the Coalition nominated a desired target of 1,000,000 international students.
But then Covid came along, the borders were closed, and international students were denied entry or told to go back to where they came from. When universities expressed their outrage at this, they were told they shouldn’t have become so dependent upon a source of income that was so vulnerable to geopolitical shifts and disruptions to the global economy.
Plenty of truth to that, of course. The University of Sydney, we now know, has been finding around 50% of its income from its international students. Unwise, to say the least, given some of the countries of origin, but also indefensible, at such a scale, as an appropriate strategy for a non-profit publicly funded institution whose primary purpose is the education of Australian citizens.
Hence Senator Sarah Henderson’s headline-grabbing claim that the University of Sydney had been swimming in ‘rivers of gold’, and needed to stop crying poor now that things had changed.
Collateral damage
But, in the end, the cap on international student enrolment numbers has little to do with improving higher education policy settings, or even about regulating the universities’ commercial behaviour so that it was more focused on the public interest. Higher education, and international students, were collateral damage as the government was focused on something else.
The declared aim of the cuts to international student enrolments was to address the influence of international students on the housing crisis, especially in rental accommodation. That idea lasted about a day, before the head of the National Housing and Affordability Support Council came out to tell us that it was nonsense. International students made up only 4% of renters and so a cap on their numbers would have a negligible effect on the housing crisis.
So, what was the real reason for such an intrusive and possibly even disastrous intervention into the operation of the universities? Clearly, it was not going to be diverted by advice from the sector. There was minimal consultation and even less interest in responding to institutional concerns when the actual figures per university were released.
Perhaps, the objective was to look like the Albanese government was actually doing something — a continuing problem for it over this term. That ‘something’ was going to address two areas of political pressure — housing and immigration. The universities, and international students, were the soft targets here. They could be used as the scapegoats for a political failure without much chance of generating any kind of electoral backlash.
Targeting the universities
It is hard not to see this as just the latest chapter in the continuing tale of political interventions which have targeted the universities.
That would include the failure to provide Jobkeeper for the universities during the pandemic, the aggressive pushback against international students who were stranded here asking for support, the introduction of (and the subsequent failure to fix) the Jobs Ready Graduate scheme which dramatically raised the cost of tuition for thousands of students, the reluctance to do anything significant to address the fundamental unfairness of the HECS/HELP repayment scheme, and so on. In the humanities disciplines, we can look even further back and include the ministerial interventions to deny funding for successful ARC grant applications in politically contentious areas such as climate change, gender and sexuality.
There might have been some hope that the Albanese government would have a different attitude to its predecessor in its support of the nation’s universities. There, the attitude had been viscerally hostile, even vindictive. The Albanese government’s Jason Clare might not be talking that kind of talk, but the walk actually looks pretty similar to what we have seen before.
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