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INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

Australia as an Higher Education Exporter

Grant Harman
Grant Harman is an emeritus professor in the Centre for Higher Education Management and Policy, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351 Australia. E-mail: gharman@une.edu.au.

This article discusses some key issues facing Australia today as a leading exporter of international education. In a little over a decade, Australian universities have made impressive developments toward the goal of internationalization of higher education. With government support, they have put considerable efforts into internationalizing curricula and achieving enhanced international research collaboration and benchmarking. But the most dramatic and important developments have been in the expansion of fee-paying international students.

Today Australia is the third-largest commercial exporter of higher education services internationally, coming in rank order after the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2004, Australian public universities enrolled a total of 210,397 international students, constituting 22.6 percent of the country’s total higher education enrollments. Private colleges enroll an additional 30,000 international students, while each semester public universities also attract about 8,000 to 10,000 study-abroad and exchange students. Both are not counted in official statistics for public institutions.

The majority of international students study at the undergraduate level, mostly for a three- or four-year bachelor's degree. In 2004, however, 40.2 percent studied for postgraduate qualifications, including 3.4 percent for doctoral degrees. The largest enrollments in 2004 were at Monash University (17,077), RMIT University (15,132), Curtin University (14,319), and Central Queensland University (10,460).

While export education has developed quickly to become an important component of the higher education sector, a number of issues call for careful monitoring and discussion. Three will be dealt with here: future demand for international student places, “offshore” international enrollments, and quality assurance and risk.

Future Student Demand
Australia has developed a special niche within the international export market, focusing particularly on providing English-language higher education to nations in the Asia Pacific region, whose own higher education sectors are unable to meet demand for student places, and to a lesser extent more widely to non-English-speaking countries. The majority of international students come mainly from a relatively small number of East Asian countries, although more recently significant numbers are being recruited from the Indian subcontinent and Europe.

While short-term student enrollment prospects until recently have been encouraging, considerable concern now exists about future demand within those East Asian countries that are expanding their own higher education systems and entering the English-language export market. However, despite major fears early this year about a possible major downturn, enrollments for 2005, in fact, increased by 6 percent, with the increases coming mainly from China and India. But significantly, there were decreases in the traditional markets of Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia have already entered in the international student market for English-languages courses as suppliers. Singapore aims to increase its foreign student enrollments from the current 60,000 to 150,000 within 10 years.

“Offshore” Education
In recent years, the balance between in-country enrollments and offshore enrollments of international students has changed, with a marked increase in the proportion of offshore. About two-thirds of international students study on university campuses within Australia, while the remainder are enrolled offshore with partner institutions, at institutions that offer Australian courses on a franchised basis, at overseas Australian university campuses, and as independent distance education students.

Almost every Australian university has multiple partnership agreements with overseas institutions for course delivery. Such partners are mainly local public and private universities, but partners also include private non-degree-granting colleges (which often teach the first two years of Australian courses), professional associations, and business firms. In its audit reports on a number of universities, the Australian Universities Quality Agency has been critical of some of these partnerships and the choice of agents to recruit international students.

A growing number of universities now operate campuses in overseas countries. Many of these are partnerships where a commercial partner owns and develops the campus and the Australian university provides academic programs. But in a small number of cases Australian universities have developed their own campuses and fully own their operations.

The most ambitious are Monash University, which has major campuses in Malaysia and South Africa and study centers in Italy and London, and RMIT University, which, with World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans of US$30 million, has set up in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) the first foreign private university in Vietnam-which this year moved to its new purpose-built campus across the river. Both the Monash campus in South Africa and the RMIT International in Vietnam have been developed without commercial partners.

The same will be true for UNSW Asia, which planned to open in Singapore in March 2007. The Singapore government announced in 2004 that it had chosen the University of New South Wales to establish the first foreign university. UNSW Asia, which will be the university’s first offshore campus and the first wholly owned research and teaching institution to be established overseas by an Australian university, is being developed with financial and other support from the Singapore Economic Development Board. Students will have the opportunity to move between the Sydney and Singapore campuses as part of their studies, and the aim is to have at least 70 percent of the student population drawn from Asia and around the world and up to 30 percent from Singapore.

Offshore international education has many attractions particularly in terms of often lower tuition fee levels and providing Western-style English-language education in the home country of students. But it provides major management challenges and considerable financial risks, especially in the development of major campuses without commercial partners.

Quality Assurance and Risks
A second issue relates to quality assurance and risk, especially with offshore ventures. The Australian Universities Quality Agency already audits all offshore operations as part of its program of regular university audits, but in response to public criticism of alleged low academic standards and “soft marking” for international students, the Australian government has provided additional funding for increased audits of offshore ventures.

Australian universities recognize the importance of taking quality assurance seriously for international students. Various allegations about low academic standards and soft marking, often made by disgruntled academics, have been seriously investigated, and most universities have in place well-developed quality assurance policies. But at the same time, there are major quality issues involved, particularly in working with overseas partners, as well as major financial risks concerning overseas campus developments by Australian public universities. This is of particular concern to state governments that technically are the owners of all public universities except for the Australian National University in the federal capital, Canberra.

Conclusion
The threat of a downturn in international student enrollments, as well as recent major losses incurred by IDP Education, a marketing company owned jointly by the Australian universities, has slightly dampened the buoyant enthusiasm of Australian universities about the future of international student enrollments. But most universities still appear to be optimistic and continue with plans for future initiatives. Moreover, recent studies of student preferences have been encouraging. One such study reported in October 2005 that, in interviews that JWT Education, a research firm, conducted with 332 undergraduates from 10 Asian markets, Australia’s popularity as a student study destination had increased appreciably since 2000.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number42/p14_Harman.htm