Andrew Bartlett has a typically measured, insightful post on the multi-stranded mess surrounding international students, particularly those from India.
On top of Andrew’s piece, I’d just like to add that I hope the government is careful in how it reforms the rules surrounding Australian study and immigration. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the current rules for gaining permanent residency, a lot of students have enrolled in courses on that basis; kicking the ground from under them now is not only going to hurt a lot of students, it might further damage Australia’s international reputation. But reform is necessary. There are courses (and not just in the scam colleges that have been the focus of recent attention) which seem to be designed primarily around meeting residency requirements. I can’t help wondering if this is to the detriment of sound and rigorous curriculum design.
“There are courses (and not just in the scam colleges that have been the focus of recent attention) which seem to be designed primarily around meeting residency requirements. ”
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This is really the Australian government’s fault, not the colleges, and it’s not necessarily negative. It seems to me the basic idea is that the government works out a list of professions that are under-supplied for some reason, and colleges then offer training in these areas. These might be areas where you simply can’t get Australians to study in, or they might be areas which would otherwise be too expensive for Australian universities to run thanks to all the crazy restrictions they have on them. To attract people into under-supplied areas (like, for example, Engineering, or your own area, ICT), it then offers points for various qualification as an incentive. What’s wrong with that? If the courses/qualifications are not well matched with the labour market, you can thank the government, versus blame the suppliers who are simply trying to fill some niche that has been created.
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“I can’t help wondering if this is to the detriment of sound and rigorous curriculum design. ”
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This is based on the rather tenuous assumption that the OS students are worse than the locals. That might be true in some areas, but in other areas which Australians appear either too lazy or too dull to in study anymore (e.g., engineering, many science areas including the majority of post-graduate areas, anything to do with mathematics…) the overseas students are generally better than the locals. Some of them come from countries where the level of mathematics is probably over a year ahead of Australia (often vastly more in post-graduate areas). So, in this respect, if anything, they are keeping the standard of the curriculum higher than it would otherwise be.
From my recent experience in Brisbane half of the taxi drivers there are from the Punjab and are studying pastry cooking. I had not realised that there was such a critical shortage of pastry chefs in the country.
And it’s still hard to get a decent samosa, too.
But seriously, this is so depressing. When I first heard of education as an export industry I thought it was a wonderful idea and something we could potentially do so well. And it has been managed so abysmally badly, so much so that the wealthier Indian families are sending their kids to NZ and other places instead. I weep for what we used to call “the clever country”. It’s not just the terrible management of the whole thing and the skewing of the focus to residency, it’s the fact that education in this country has become a commodity and mere job-training – as PC and others pointed out on the melbourne Uni thread. We don’t respect learning ourselves so how can it be an export industry?
I doubt that the ‘rogue agent’ crackdown is simply window dressing. I’ve got family in the industry and heard many stories of exorbitant fees of up to 50% of their course fees paid upfront to the agent in some countries. One of the biggest problems is with the promise of reasonable class sizes often made in brochures. The reality is that classes are often packed with far more than the 12-15 people pictured smiling.
More than most innovative industries, our international education market relies on lavish promises. The difference between this and biotech or energy research is that when those promises are not fulfilled the subjects of ‘innovation’ bite back
Um, no. It’s based around the assumption that overseas students might have different priorities to local students.
Conrad – you are correct (IMHO) that Aussie students don’t really seem that keen on the “hard” sciences anymore. But I’d disagree on the overseas students being any better.
In many skills they may be better, but language/cultural barriers are still a major problem – in particular the “rote-learning” culture (predominant in many parts of the world). This disinclines people from learning concepts and techniques “from scratch” – a real problem for anyone who wants a career in the sciences/engineering.
The language issue is only really a problem from a training/OHS perspective – I’ve had some close calls in labs several times caused by people who couldn’t read the safety signs and/or placards.
Please note I do NOT blame the students for this – those attracting them (government or private) to our degrees should ensure they have the language skills for everyday use (which in a lab means dealing with many hazards).
Earning/job prospect outcomes will always influence people away from sciences/engineering (at least at the moment), just in the same way that someone from India/wherever is influenced but the poutcomes they see in their home country.
We absolutely need OS people for these fields, but FWIW they must have some skills before starting such courses.
Our government needs to tread very carefully in this area, our history means many changes could be seen as racist when in fact they would be of benefit to all.
Let’s just reword that to “outcomes” shall we?
Now I is a skientist
Robert;
Part of the problem is the mixing together of educational, immigration and labour-market policies. In the terms of our common trade, these are tightly coupled.
My own position is predictable, as a former LDP candidate. Immigration should be completely separated from education and labour markets; the latter should be allowed to clear on their own.
I dont know why we dont jsut make thinsg simpler….obviously there are a lot of international students who come to australia to study to make it easier to get permanent residency….they probably end up doing courses they dont even want to do….so why don’t we cut that part out, make anyone wanting to immigrate pay 50K, let them wait 3-4 years in their home countries and then let them come over here….and then give that money to the higher ed sector for additional funding….this way theer are no wasted resources, people don’t get taken advantage of and unis get additional funding……
….and of course anyone genuinly wanting to study but was not intersetd in residency could come over and study if they wished to…..
What Helen @#3 said.
Howard was the complicit super-shyster who conspired with the foxes to leave the “education” chook-house door open.
Is it surprising that the foxes flocked to this feast?
I’m glad that, finally, foreign students are demonstrating that they know the difference between education and crap.
They have that perceptual advantage over successive Australian governments.
It would also hurt a significant export industry. The Rudd government wouldn’t treat our aluminium smelters, gas liquifiers, or coal exporters like that.
“It’s based around the assumption that overseas students might have different priorities to local students”
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If it’s just different priorities, then I don’t really see how that could affect the curriculum negatively. It seems to me most OS students want to work really hard and pass their degrees, no matter what. That’s surely a positive compared to many local students who seem to be doing their degrees for reasons they’re not sure of, arn’t willing to work hard, and want to pass their degrees no matter what also. So what priority difference between overseas and local students is going to make the curriculum worse? It beats me. I personally don’t even think of the distinction between OS and local students when I design a course, except for the fact I have better resources because of it, and hence can run a better course.
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“But I’d disagree on the overseas students being any better.”
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Actually, if you look at exit data across universities, you’ll find that they do very similarly (I can dig some up if you want). That’s not bad given that, at least at universities, they’re generally doing the harder courses.
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“From my recent experience in Brisbane half of the taxi drivers there are from the Punjab and are studying pastry cooking. I had not realised that there was such a critical shortage of pastry chefs in the country.”
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Again, thank the government, not the providers.
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“When I first heard of education as an export industry I thought it was a wonderful idea and something we could potentially do so well. And it has been managed so abysmally badly”
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I disagree. It’s a massive industry — of course there are problems. However, most of the sector works well and happily, Australia gets lots of smart young well educated people who are willing to not only contribute to their own education, but cross-subsidize the local (generally richer) population. If there are few dodgy providers here and there then that’s an issue, but it doesn’t make the rest of the industry bad.
It would also hurt a significant export industry
It seems to me the significant export industry has been doing more than enough to hurt itself.
The first requirement if you’re going to export a product to a new market is that you manage your quality control to prevent damage to the brand, but greed has led a lot of the education sector to neglect this in favour of a quick quid. There needs to be far tighter accreditation requirements for courses, and unaccredited courses should simply not be permitted to sell into these markets. They should certainly not be recognised for migration purposes.
Even then it will take many, many years to repair the damage done by the goldrush mentality and its associated corruption.
Hi Conrad – If you have a link or reference I would be very interested actually. I’m a nerd for this stuff
Derrida – Problem was there was almost no QC on any of this. All of a sudden (when JWH came in) the unis were being told to piss off and get some OS people to keep their funding. After having a fair wack of funding cut they definitely went for the quick buck. I’ve seen OS researchers selected purely on their ability to raise grant money (while other OS researchers who produced better quality were ignored/fobbed off) – a problem at certain Unnamed Sandstone Unis.
Add in some greedy b@#$ who saw an instant market with little regulation (particularly the vocational market) and there you have it!
Vale TAFE…
You beat me to it, Katz, but this whole problem is definitely part of the Howard Miracle. The little fucker has a lot to answer for, and it’ll take us 20 years to clean up the mess he left behind him.
The real link seems to be down at the moment, but here is a summary:
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http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number42/p11_Olsen_Burgess_Sharma.htm
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DD: “The first requirement if you’re going to export a product to a new market is that you manage your quality control to prevent damage to the brand, but greed has led a lot of the education sector to neglect this in favour of a quick quid.”
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DD, OS students are neither a new nor homogenous market. In addition, it isn’t quality control which is the current problem, nor making a quick quid (which it never was for most universities — the money is in fact very to get). The biggest thing that has hurt the industry of late is attacks on Indian students and the perception Australian is racist and violent (the second of which is true incidentally according to OECD figures). This has basically damaged a market for what would have been a population that could and no doubt would have contributed a lot to Australia, so everyone loses.
#15 David Irving (no relation)
Jul 31st, 2009 at 4:13 pm
I fully agree.
I have some friends who work at a high level in social policy who with the utmost seriousness state categorically that we will need at least one generation before the damage of the COALition decade [and there were more players than just Howard] washes out of the system.
Maybe longer.
That’s because the universities bend over backwards dumbing down the courses so they will graduate. We don’t want to give up on that cash cow over trivial things such as ‘quality’ and ‘integrity’ now do we?
Gaining PR seems to be a perfectly legitimate goal for someone undertaking an Australian education. Whatever the outcome of the “mess” in terms of changing regulations I hope it will only touch on what standards of admission and content education providers have to abide by without trying to use the system to tinker with or dampen the hopes and expectations of students at arm’s length, especially, as you point out, those that have already committed themselves to a difficult course of study under certain assumptions.
To do so would be to indulge in hypocrisy when you consider the premium that Australians still place on an overseas education in the UK or the US.
It also seems to make economic sense to get someone overseas to pay for an export that we do our best not to export.
“That’s because the universities bend over backwards dumbing down the courses so they will graduate. We don’t want to give up on that cash cow over trivial things such as ‘quality’ and ‘integrity’ now do we?”
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Since the comparison is between overseas and local students, obviously that means the courses are dumbed down for local students too, yet strangely, they don’t seem to do any better (indeed worse in some situations).
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You’re also caught in the mindset that somehow quality is worse because of overseas students — that’s far from the truth. Quality is certainly higher because of the money they bring. They also force the government to pay more attention to the system, and that no doubt increases quality too. If you want to see what a cash strapped system with little scrutiny looks like, feel free to compare Australia with France. After working in both system, it’s pretty clear to me which is better.
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It seems to me that you’re a good example of the average ignorant Australian on this. Somehow or other your underlying assumption is that all of these overseas students have a low intelligence, can’t speak English, are lazy and have no academic aptitude. This is of course unlike the average Australian student, who is obviously perfectly literate and great with numbers too. No doubt just the thought of going down to the level of the overseas students gives them a headache.
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These overseas student myths are just blatant racism in my books, no doubt thought of by a bunch of losers who can’t stand the idea that other people, despite the poverty they often come from and the accents some of them happen to have, might actually end up more successful than them even after having to pay to educate themselves.
Most students will do enough to pass. You lower the standards, you lower the amount they learn. The lowering of passing standards has lowered the standard of teaching as there’s little point in attempting to teach something that’s not part of the course.
No. Standards are dropped to ensure they pass. If they stop passing, they stop enrolling. If they stop enrolling they stop paying. The short-term money grabbing by the universities is the problem, and has been driven by the funding cuts by the government.
I made no assumption about all overseas students. I have no problem with overseas students. I have a problem with the reliance on overseas students for funding. It drives the attempts to facilitate overseas students at the cost of quality. As far as I understand these students don’t go through the same standard filtering process (high school scores, etc) that local ones do, because they pay up front.
“The lowering of passing standards has lowered the standard of teaching.”
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Actually, the most likely cause of lower teaching standards (if that is really true) is lack of funding (with lower being “worse”) and hence in turn poor teaching resources and high staff-studio ratios. Overseas students fees reduce these problems, which benefits everyone. If you mean “lower” being “teach-less” then surely locals should have a far higher pass rate, everything being so easy for them. But that isn’t the case either.
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“No. Standards are dropped to ensure they pass. If they stop passing, they stop enrolling. If they stop enrolling they stop paying”
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Who said they were failing to start with and who said their standards were lower? Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you, but until recently, most students came from places like Malaysia (English speaking), Singapore (English speaking), and Hong Kong (semi-English speaking), the second two of which have far higher high school standards than Australia (I remember doing my degree at the start of the 90s, and the Malaysian students in my course had already done the first year and half of mathematics). This idea that, overall, they are bringing standards down is just fantasy land and a convenient scape-goat.
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“As far as I understand these students don’t go through the same standard filtering process (high school scores, etc) that local ones do, because they pay up front.”
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Actually, many places have extremely strict standards — in my department, we constantly reject OS students or poor English standards despite being able to charge them more, and for the post-graduate courses, they need to get their degrees ratified by an external body not related to the university. I believe that most of the Go8, which have even stricter standards than us, reject piles and piles of them. I also imagine places like Melbourne could probably get rid of local students altogether in many courses if they really wanted to. The fact that places like CQU and UNE get in the news because they don’t isn’t indiciative of what is going on at most places.
I’m not sure that international students are the reason for the lower standards in university undergraduate teaching. But I suspect that the declining standards and the problems faced by international students have the same cause – Howard’s legacy.
IMHO the quality of undergraduate TEACHING has increased considerably over the years. It is the STANDARDS OF SCHOLARSHIP REQUIRED OF STUDENTS that have declined, at least in the areas I teach. Both developments were natural and inevitable once university education stopped being a privilege reserved for a small minority of people and became an entitlement that everyone was encouraged to take advantage of.
International students bring their own complicating factors in that failing one risks losing revenue, and it would be blind to pretend that doesn’t affect the attitudes of many staff, especially those charged with meeting student enrolment targets. However the powerful tendency to make passing easier would have developed regardless.
“International students bring their own complicating factors in that failing one risks losing revenue”
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Actually, aside from the very few that fail everything and have to be booted from the university, it increases revenue, since they have to pay for the subject they fail twice.
Conrad I believe they have to maintain a certain level of success to keep their visas. Certainly that’s the understanding the students themselves have, as I can attest from having to cope with emotional appeals from students who have failed subjects and tell me they will lose their scholarships and/or their visas as a consequence.
Local students, on the other hand, can repeat a subject pretty much as often as they like and incur a huge potential HECS obligation. However to judge from the work of the serial repeaters, they will be lucky ever to get a job above the HECS repayment threshold.
Conrad, I should note that that:
* there are good and bad students of all backgrounds.
* International students, many of whom do stay on in Australia, make a very considerable contribution to our education sector and the nation. The PhD students in our research group, mainly from China and Bangladesh, are bright, diligent, and creative, and it’s a pleasure to work with them.
* That said, there are international students for whom the first priority is getting PR, and courses which are geared to this end to the detriment of the quality and usefulness of the education provided. This occurs across the tertiary education sector.
Robert: “and courses which are geared to this end to the detriment of the quality and usefulness of the education provided”
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I’ve no doubt these courses exist, but it seems to me they are really the minority, and a lot of people are just complaining and are ignorant of the reality. For example, at least in the university sector, people complain about business and IT courses, yet the number of local students who do some aspects of business courses (economics) or IT is extremely limited. Yet both of these skills are needed. If there happens to be a bad subject or two, well, there is in many degrees, and that’s something that could and should be fixed for everyone. I can look around where you work at Swinny (which I believe has the highest OS enrollment of any university in Victoria), for example, and most of the courses seem fine. The students doing IT are learning no less than those doing social sciences (another area people love to complain about for different reasons — yet many people learn a lot in those degrees too) and most of them would no doubt love dearly to have middle-class IT jobs and no doubt would love doing them too. They’re also willing to learn whatever is necessary to get them those jobs. This attitude no doubt represents the majority of OS students in our universities, including those that go home.
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Another assumption people falsely make is that these students are only doing the course to get residency. Now, whilst I’m also completely aware that some OS students are willing to change jobs simply because of the requirements and that for some it is their first priority, the idea that they are changing to do something they really don’t want to do is generally false (perhaps not in the non-university sector, which I don’t know much about). The reason for this is the same as the local students — many don’t know exactly what they want to do, and are willing to do anything that leads to a decent career. Whether that happens to be IT, biology, or horticulture probably doesn’t make much difference to them, just like it doesn’t for many local students. It’s why doing two different majors is a good idea. As long as the government list remains broad enough, it means even those that want residency will still choose something they want to do — the two concepts arn’t orthogonal.
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KL: The OS students have to not only maintain a level, but they have attendance requirements too (generally not enforced, since people don’t always take attendance figures). Also, getting booted out is university specific — where I work failing something 3 times will do it, and time requirements for postgraduate completion are getting quite strict.
Is it an individual student mess or just another private education mess. My prediction is that eventually the whole privatised education and training industry, for Australians as well as overseas students, will be exposed as a mess – much like the UK’s Individual Learning Account fraud of the early 2000s. The same policy of privatisation, the same lack of regulation and monitoring, and many of the same dodgy companies that were in the UK are now in Australia.
I think the issues around foreign uni students and foreign TAFE-type students are related but different.
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Certainly some unis have compromised their standards (especially with regard to English proficiency), but by and large the uni sector has done OK. A bit of tightening up of regulation, in the interests of preserving reputation, is all that’s needed.
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The real rorts have beewn in vocational “training”. This needs root and branch reform.
Speaking as someone dealing on the frontline with the fallout of this mess, There’s a couple of other points I’d like to throw in.
I think if we want to look at root causes it’s really important to cover the significant defunding of all forms of tertiary education under Howard, but particularly for the university sector. While others here may be able to provide data for us to chew on, it’s certainly my impression that one of the ways our education institutions have dealt with the defunding is the focus on the international student market, and of course this got the blessing of the Howard gov’t as a ‘free market’ solution to providing Australians access to decent tertiary education.
But one of the fallouts of that is that I don’t think many unis and other genuine education providers have had much spare cash from the fees they charge the international students to comprehensively invest in the support services those students need – and I’d argue are entitled to when you’re paying multiple thousands per year for a course.
For eg, many interntaional students have been caught out by the cost of renting in Australia, and there clearly isn’t the amount of affordable student accommodation needed available to match the numbers of international students accepted to study here. You would think that the unis with the $$ would be building more accommodation etc. The shortfall is so large I have concluded they either didn’t see they had a duty of care, or needed the revenue for other basics to keep their institutions credible, having lost a lot of public funding. Or both.
Anyone got thoughts in this area?
Secondly I’d like to talk a little about Australia as a host community, starting with employment. The media has touched upon the 900 hour work experience requirement for certain visa classes (without specifying pay) that has led international students to be exploited.
What hasn’t been talked about is that even without this loophole, there is still a major issue with students being exploited as they try and earn enough to live in Australia, while in the vast majority of cases they are restricted to legally only working for 20 hours. The problem is that many of them end up working for far less than minimum wage (I’ve even heard of cases of students working in restaurants for food at the end of the day), because of a combination of ignorance about their rights, willingness to be exploited because they fear not being able to / losing their job, intense competition from other students willing to do low paid work in the various sectors where work is available to them, cultural expectations and misconceptions, and of course a bunch of employers – often from their own community – looking for cheap labour. Finally, many who come here and find they can’t afford to live on what they earn and their parents provide don’t tell their parents because of shame and the fact that in many instances their parents have mortgaged themselves to the hilt to pay for the education, and the only predicator of getting out of the debt is their child succeeding in Australia.
So in hosting many tens of thousands of international students, even without the farcical 900 hour work experience requirement, we have created a system that leaves international students very exposed to work exploitation. Of course the wonderful catch-22 is that if you are being underpaid you are far less likely to earn enough in 20 hours to sustain yourself, so many end up in breach of their visa condition, which clever employers then exploit as well. It can hardly be good for Australia’s labour market as a whole to have several hundred thousand potentially underpaid workers floating about, and it’s certainly not good for our international relations, our chances of providing a safe and appropriate environment to international students, and to our immigration policy.
Finally I’d like to touch on broader host community issues.
There are now something like 300,000 international students in Australia, concentrated in Melbourne and Sydney. There are 50,000 Indian students studying in Melbourne alone. While there’s been policy to allow the international student market to expand, no work seems to have been done on the impacts having such a large influx of people might have, what demographic changes & impacts they might have in specific areas, what the expectations of students would be as a community entity, and how to prepare the host community for such a sudden influx of people.
As just one example, there’s strong evidence to suggest that attacks on Indian students in Western Sydney areas are partially caused by those suburb’s dominant Lebanese Australian population feeling very threatened by a rapid influx of several thousand international students (predominantly Indian) finding accommodation and work in those cheaper suburbs. You would think that intelligent studies looking at accommodation prices, where the established Indian community lives and proximity of education institutions via public transport would have predicted this, and then there could have been work to prepare the host community, and the students.
Time and again Australia’s immigration policy in key areas focuses on the indvidual (eligibility, compliance, fees, visa pathway etc.) and doesn’t look at the broader ripples that large movements and arrivals of people cause in geographically defined areas, and sometimes in issues or infrastructure-defined areas. It fails repeatedly to look out how the host community will percieve and respond, what information is needed, what other forms of preparation are needed to ensure the best possible outcome.
It’s not rocket science, but addressing it does require collaboration between multiple government sectors and between levels of government. We actually do it reasonably well with our humanitarian resettlement program (although it stands out as an area needing improvement and a more consistent approach). There is a need to extend that understanding to a very large group of people whom we host for multiple years, many of whom will become Australians by choice.
This is a larger and longer-term issue than that of stamping out the dodginess that’s been allowed to flourish in certain parts of the international education & migration industry, and decoupling education, labor and immigration policy. You could do all those things, and still face difficulties on multiple fronts because of the role of the host community, and whether its needs have been met to ensure that international students are welcomed and valued.