A new survey from Education Consultants Association of Australia claims that one-third of the 106,000 Chinese international students blocked from travelling to Australia are considering studying in a competitor country:
[The survey] found 32 per cent of more than 16,000 students surveyed said they would enrol in another country if they could not be in Australia for the first semester of 2020…
Asked about their preferred “redirection destinations”, 58 per cent of students chose the UK, 31 per cent chose Canada and six per cent chose the US.
The survey was conducted from 5 February to 9 February via Chinese social media platform, WeChat, with 73 per cent of students currently studying in Australia and 26 per cent new students…
Group of Eight (Go8) chief executive Vicki Thomson told SBS News the survey was “a real signal of concern … that these students will go elsewhere”.
More than 105,000 international students from China attend the eight universities in the group.
Ms Thomson noted that Australia’s two major competitors in the higher education industry – the UK and Canada – did not have travel bans in place.
“This could be a lost opportunity,” she said…
An earlier analysis from Standard & Poor’s said universities could lose $3 billion in fees alone if Chinese students stayed away.
Having fewer Chinese studying at Australian universities would be a positive development in light of Australia’s extreme concentration and reliance on this single source.
As shown in the next chart from Professor Salvatore Babones, one-in-nine students studying at Australia’s universities was from China in 2017, and this concentration is even higher at the Group of Eight universities:
With a more balanced student intake, English-language and teaching standards would improve, rates of cheating would fall, and local students may no longer be forced to work on group assignments where everyone gets the same mark but only a few locals fluent in English meaningfully contribute.
While it will be painful financially in the short-term, the fallout from the Coronavirus is the hit “our” universities needs to wean themselves off the sugar teat of Chinese students.
