Studying in Australia shouldn’t be a lonely experience
Forget about Covid for a minute and the havoc it wreaked on international education that was once Australia’s giant, $ 40 billion a year for services export. Think back to pre-Covid, in 2019, when international education peaked and was the result of extraordinary expansion.
In 2014, education exports totaled $ 19.8 billion. Five years later, in 2019, it had more than doubled to $ 40.3 billion. It was a gold rush in which the number of students grew rapidly and the universities were collecting ever larger sums of money for the construction of new buildings and laboratories and the hiring of new researchers. With a boom in student dormitories, investment poured into the sector and investors couldn’t get enough of education companies.
But when an industry is growing so fast and everyone is swept away with enthusiasm, it’s easy to overlook important things.
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Some of them show up in the 2020 International Student Experience Survey, an official study commissioned by the federal government, published last week. It’s a large-scale annual exercise run by the Australian National University’s Social Research Center that has garnered nearly 90,000 responses from international students over the past year. It’s the best insight into what students think of their experiences in Australia during the boom years.
The interesting thing is that her opinion about her undergraduate experience in Australia is remarkably stable. From 2014 to 2019, the proportion who rated their educational experience as positive was in the narrow range of 74 to 76 percent.
Then it fell to 63 percent last year for obvious reasons. All higher education this year has been hard hit by the pandemic.
But since 2014-19, not only international students have remained unchanged in their overall picture of their Australian education in these years. Her view of all five components that make up the entire educational experience also remained stable.
Take them one by one. The development of qualifications was about 80 percent positive; Teaching quality, approx. 78 percent; student support, about 71 percent; Learning resources, about 83 percent. The outlier was the engagement of the learners, which was around 58 percent and did not move in those six years.
Since learner engagement is the outlier in the survey, which is consistently bad, it is interesting to see how it is defined.
In order to measure the engagement of the learner, international students were asked whether they felt prepared for their studies, had a sense of belonging to their institution, participated in discussions, collaborated with other students in their studies, interacted with students outside of their studies, with students interacted differently from them and interacted with local students.
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A large part of the international students obviously considered these aspects to be inferior. In other words, they missed out on study abroad that is of lasting value: meeting new people, making lifelong friends in a different culture, and enjoying class conversations as an integral part of learning.
The scary thing is that this measure hasn’t changed in six years. Whatever was done by the universities to improve it had no effect. And remember, these were the boom years in international education when resources could have been found to solve a fundamental problem like this.
When students finally return to Australia – which is likely only after next year’s general election given the political situation – universities will need to develop a new and more effective strategy to attract international students.
In part, that’s what students owe when they travel to another country and pay heavy fees for a quality educational experience. You should go home with a number of lifelong friends and feel that studying in Australia has paid off personally. Studying in Australia shouldn’t be a lonely experience.
But partly it is for us too.
One of the advantages for Australia of hosting international students is that our young people get acquainted with their peers in other countries. We want them to interact, mingle, and create connections that will last a lifetime. It is also building an Australia that is growing in its understanding of its neighbors, that is ready to deal with the world, and that is a richer place – both materially and spiritually.
To be fair, it’s not an easy problem to solve. But one thing that would help would be avoiding the mistake of focusing international students on business degrees where they study together. Universities must also help local students to see international students as an asset to their education and certainly not as people with whom one should avoid group tasks.
Success won’t be easy; it will take a lot of work. But on the flip side, this could make Australia’s business of hosting international students much more than just money.
Sydney
Tim Dodd is the college editor of The Australian. He has over 25 years of experience as a journalist and covers a wide variety of public policy, economics, politics and foreign affairs, including b … Read moreSince you are following Tim Dodd, you might like more stories from this author. To manage the stories shown, go to Edit My Australians
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