In one article, The Australian’s higher education shill, Tim Dodd, has neatly highlighted how international education ‘exports’ are wildly exaggerated.
On the one hand, Dodd argued that international education generated a whopping $10.4 billion in exports over the December quarter of 2019:
In the December quarter of 2019, the last “normal” quarter before Covid put an end to international student arrivals, Australia’s education exports were worth $10.4bn.
That’s the total value of international student spending in Australia in those three months – the money they paid for tuition, accommodation, food, entertainment, travel, and all the miscellaneous things necessary to live in another country.
Five years earlier education exports were worth $5.3bn in the December quarter, barely half as much. That shows the sheer size of the boom in international education that Australia experienced in the 2010s.
Only to then admit that many international students pay their way by working in Australia:
Businesses also came to rely on the labour of international students. They worked in pubs and restaurants, did cleaning jobs, cared for elderly people, drove taxis and worked in factories. With no new influx of students over the last two years some industry sectors are struggling, particularly now that the economy is opening up…
There are incentives in place to try to boost student numbers. The Morrison government has waived the visa fee for those who arrive between January 19 and fore March 19. And it has removed the 40 hour per fortnight cap on the time which international students are allowed to spend working.
This will help those students who need to work to pay their fees and support themselves, and it’s also a benefit to the short-staffed hospitality industry, which has pushed government to introduce such measures…
Allowing students to work unlimited hours means that students from poorer countries will soon be clamouring to come to Australia, not to study, but to work and send money home. Education rapidly becomes a de facto migrant labour scheme, and dodgy agents and dodgy colleges appear on the scene very quickly to facilitate it.
Memo to Tim Dodd: any expenditure paid for with money earned working in Australia is by definition not an export. Yet the ABS and industry shills wrongly claim that it is.
In the lead-up to the pandemic, India and Nepal had rapidly grown their share of international education ‘exports’, taking second and third place behind China:
Yet, the overwhelming majority of these students from South Asia (as well as the Philippines and Colombia) undertook paid employment in Australia to support themselves:
Indeed, the notion of international education ‘exports’ only really applies to Chinese students, since they tend to fund themselves with Chinese money rather than employment income earned in Australia.
As explained by Associate Professor Salvatore Babones in his latest book, “Australia’s universities, can they reform”:
In reality, everyone (except perhaps the government and the universities) knew that many international students pay for their courses out of the proceeds of their work in-country, often working excessive hours under exploitative conditions, in violation of their visa terms. This situation is especially common among South Asian students, and is reflected in the steep fall-off in South Asian student numbers when teaching moved online. With prospective students unable to rely on employment income in Australia to support their studies, new commencements of Indian students at Australian higher education providers fell 65% between 2019 and 2021; for Nepali students, the decline was 37%; for Pakistanis, 45%; for Sri Lankans, 54%. These countries are simply too poor to send large cohorts of international students to Australian universities based on family resources alone. For many South Asian students, a student visa is a very expensive but thinly disguised work visa.
Last decade we witnessed widespread immigration scams involving students from Nepal and India. The Morrison Government’s recent decision to grant VET graduates an automatic two-year temporary graduate visa, alongside uncapping work restrictions, will inevitably lead to tens of thousands of poorer students from these nations undertaking cheap mickey mouse courses in order to work in Australia and gain permanent residency.
The above is also more proof that ‘international education’ is mostly a people-importing immigration industry rather than a genuine education export industry. Student visas are mostly a low-skilled work visa in disguise.
If work rights and permanent residency were scaled back, the whole international education industry would implode.
