Government policy ‘exacerbates bush divide’ for overseas students

Australia’s enhancement of graduate work rights has diminished foreigners’ appetite for study in the bush, and the looming reimposition of an online study limit could make matters worse.

Mike Ferguson, pro vice-chancellor of Charles Sturt University (CSU), said international students’ readiness to accept enrolment offers from his institution had almost halved since the government boosted their post-study work entitlements by two years.

Mr Ferguson said that, although foreigners could still add a further two years by enrolling in regional campuses, that no longer seemed tempting now that they could earn as much as five years by studying in Sydney.

“The feedback we’ve had from education agents is that post-study work is no longer an incentive for international students to consider a regional destination,” he told the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. “That policy has had a significant negative impact on our international objectives.”

The committee, which is inquiring into Australian tourism and international education, held a hearing in the regional centre of Orange, where CSU has a campus. Mr Ferguson said research suggested that just 3 per cent of overseas students targeted regional institutions like his.  

He said a rule preventing international students from undertaking more than one third of their degrees online excluded many of CSU’s “niche and more interesting courses”, which were delivered virtually because the university’s “disperse catchment area” made face-to-face classes unviable.

This limited CSU’s overseas enrolments to “a very narrow range” of courses in areas such as allied health and teaching, he said.

During the pandemic, Australia’s higher education regulator overlooked the requirement for foreigners to undertake at least two thirds of their courses on campus, but will enforce it again from July. Mr Ferguson said the online limit should be raised to 50 per cent, at least for regional universities.

“You’ve got to get a balance,” he told the committee. “You can’t have them coming here and studying fully online. Fifty per cent gives us that balance.”

He said that, although CSU had experienced record international enrolments in its regional campuses last year, they had totalled just 466 in a university with 40,000 students – a “very small proportion compared with most Australian universities, where the average is about 27 per cent”.

Regional universities’ relatively small share of overseas enrolments puts them at a major disadvantage in Australia, where foreign tuition fees cross-subsidise research. CSU’s earnings from international students declined by 81 per cent or A$126 million (£66 million) between 2019 and 2022.

Although this was partly because of border closures during the recession, it was largely driven by CSU’s closure of three city campuses, which had caused the university regulatory grief in 2019.  

Mr Ferguson said CSU now planned to open a “much smaller” campus in Sydney next year, catering to domestic as well as international students. He said that, although CSU had a “strategic priority” to double international enrolments in its regional campuses, “we also need to be pragmatic” given the “very low propensity of international students to consider regional locations”.

The new Sydney campus was not a purely financial exercise, he said, with CSU requiring a metropolitan presence to drive “meaningful” partnerships with overseas universities – particularly for student exchanges.

Committee member Julian Hill expressed concerns that regional universities’ city campuses, which were “full of” international students and subcontracted their teaching to private colleges, were “a low-rent money-making exercise”.

He said their courses were not being taught by the university or “adding to the vibrancy” of regional campuses. “But…if the funding model seems to rely on universities making their money from international students, then what are regional universities supposed to do?”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com