JC Denton wrote on Nov 2
nd, 2023 at 1:37pm:
Stupidity and greed are a bad combination. Think Al Capone. Think Alan Bond. Think Australia’s elite universities.
The latter dynamited our university system by mainlining on lucrative international students, who disappeared with Covid. Now they are at it again. Overseas students are being mustered like brumbies and every reform is resisted like poison. Overwhelmingly, international students enrol in big brands such as the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. It is not about good education, just the right rubber stamp. It is like a cattle market where the cows are lured, not herded.
Cattle is the right expression.For universities such as those in the Group of Eight, international students are cash cows. They are there for their high fees, not their education and wellbeing. So well-heeled institutions have ruthlessly stockpiled these students. Their great educational qualification is that they are just so much more fiscally winsome than low-paying Australians whose fees are set by government.
The greed of elite institutions has no cap. Before Covid, ANU had almost 50 per cent international students. Competitors such as Sydney and Monash were around 40 per cent. Particularly valuable are well-heeled Chinese students. As one former sandstone vice-chancellor exulted in an academic group, they would keep enrolling wealthy Chinese until someone stopped him.
Despite the lesson of Covid that the tap suddenly can be turned off, these guys are gorging like wolverines. They want to match or exceed pre-Covid heights. Like the Bourbon kings, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They certainly do not remember the disaster of Covid when their entire business model collapsed.
Then, Go8 vice-chancellors were wringing their hands and pressuring governments to restart international students, virus-ridden or not. They still refuse to accept that their cash mules are inherently vulnerable. Another virus, a more hostile China banning Australian students or a major shift in student demand would leave the Universities of Pride high and dry again.
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The public goods sacrificed in this unequal exchange are enormous. International students are short-changed. Australian students discounted. Regional universities gazumped. Sectoral diversity discouraged.
Now, the enrolment guzzlers are opposing every possible reform. They put the rent back into rent seekers. A first proposal was for a percentage cap on international enrolments at any given institution Hysterics, tantrums and vapours ensued, and the idea was washed away in a flood of crocodile tears about discrimination against international students.
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For those who adulate established universities over “lower quality” institutions, think of this. Which universities have devalued freedom of speech; peddled postmodernism; dissed Western civilisation; minimised anti-Semitism; and genuflected to Trotskyist student unions?
Greed may be good but it is never good education policy.
Greg Craven is a constitutional lawyer and former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.