International Education: Export Winner, or Political Loser?

Brian Stoddart unpicks why international education finds itself under attack and argues for a new approach.

Global affairs have likely reached yet another major inflection point: state polities produce strange patterns (the National Party government in New Zealand); unorthodox players are massively disruptive (the Houthis); ideological stance trumps economic rationality (much of the West dealing with China); and decisive leadership seems missing in action everywhere.

Significantly, that is extending into normally untouched realms, one special case being that of international (or, for some, transnational) education which, in several countries over the past twenty years or more, has not only propped up otherwise lagging university funding but also contributed massively to much needed export income.

In Australia, for example, international education services have for twenty years or more ranked consistently in the top four export income earners alongside iron ore, coal and tourism. During 2023, the University of Sydney alone reeled in $A1.5 billion, a reflection that it is now over forty percent budget dependent on that income stream. In the United Kingdom during 2021, export education reached £27.9 billion with an official objective being to hit £35 billion by 2030. Curiously, though, the industry does not appear regularly in lists of leading UK export earners, being either lumped in with “Services” or studiously ignored. On one 2024 list, that 2021 figure had it appeared would have made education the third highest earner behind precious metals and the automotive industry and ahead of aeronautical exports and the petroleum industry. But it did not appear.

Overall, it is estimated that there are now approximately seven million international students worldwide, contributing around $US 400 million to the global economy. Countries like Canada take in over $C20 billion a year while the USA has always been a major destination.

At a time when persistent murmurs threaten a global economic recession and economies everywhere struggle to recover from COVID ravages, it might be expected that this successful industry would be embraced thankfully.

Not so.                                                                     

Australia’s Labor government has just introduced to parliament an amending bill for the Education Services to Overseas Students (ESOS) Act, intended to systematically reduce the numbers of such students by setting caps on individual institutional intake numbers, capping intakes into specific disciplines, and implementing significant fines for transgressing organisations. A pre-Budget leak set the tone – the Government would double international student visa application fees, the present one already among the highest anywhere. That did not eventuate but the message was clear: these students are no longer welcome.

In the UK, a complicated saga saw the Tory government look to remove the two year “right to stay” for international student graduates, having already removed associated family member visa rights. That raised sufficient a storm for the matter to go to independent review by the Migration Advisory Committee which found no reason the proposal should proceed. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak responded immediately - the government might just proceed anyway, despite objections from many of his MPs and Ministers including Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron, the Home Secretary and the Education Secretary.

Across in Canada early in 2024, the Trudeau government introduced an Australia-like restriction plan with some observers predicting a thirty five percent reduction in student visa issuance. At the same time, under government pressure, the Netherlands peak university body announced its members would lower international student intakes, reduce recruiting and the number of programs being conducted in English, and restrict foundation programs enabling subsequent foreign student enrolment in regular degree programs. And following Norway’s introduction of fees for non-EU or Swiss students, enrolments there have declined perhaps by eighty per cent.

It seems illogical that these severe curbs are arising while the programs they target are so successful, but they all reflect some common elements, being:

• Not exclusive to right wing/conservative governments.
• Inextricably linked to national debates on immigration and multicultural issues.
• Linked to national/domestic student rights and outcomes.
• Simultaneously raised at a time of free speech and autonomy concerns.
• Connected to questions about the purpose of higher education.
• Coterminous with debates about innovation and productivity.
• A reconsideration of globalisation.

Given all that, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that what happens next is important not only for universities and the economies of which they are a constituent part, but also for the very future of higher education in the global context.

The Norway and Netherlands cases make it is easy enough to link these developments with ultra conservative governments leaning on the idea of nation first and others last. The emphasis is on access, opportunity and benefits for nationals. That makes immigration control a prime lever to be manipulated in favour of national development above global positioning or consideration. In those jurisdictions, and in places like France where an emphasis on local priority commands strong political support, foreign students are easily positioned to be seen as eroding those goals, especially if post-study and associated family rights are involved.

That story is more complicated in, say, Australia, Canada and the UK where multiculturalism and its consequences have recently emerged as pressure points in varying terms.

Australia now has the unique distinction of both major political parties attempting to outdo each other on restricting immigration and using students as a prime target. A curious amalgam of housing pressure, skills shortages, inflation and public opinion polls are swaying politicians in the run up to yet another election. That has seen Labor link a reformist University Accord process with an emphasis on skills and employability to set an alleged new direction for university education. Some curious mixes have emerged – it now appears the new Tertiary Education Commission will not incorporate the regulatory body (the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Authority) or the major research funder (the Australia Research Council) as first posited, so a fair question is precisely what it will cover. One obvious answer is system funding, although the government has studiously avoided any improved funding promises.

That is where the international student dimension re-enters, because for years Australian universities (and their counterparts in New Zealand, Canada and the UK) have argued that international student fees covered funding cracks brought on by persistent government underfunding in both teaching and research. By restricting international student numbers, then, the government is effectively placing itself in a position where it will have to increase funding outlays immeasurably if it is to deliver on promises of even more an educated workforce, and being prominent in the distortion of university ranking tables.

As one commentator notes, if this all comes to fruition then the Australian higher education sector could be in dire straits, losing billions of dollars at a time of declining domestic enrolment, stalled government funding ratios, and higher costs. Andrew Norton, a noted higher education policy maven, goes even further, seeing the proposals as an outright attack on the universities and their work.  

If anything, those complexities are amplified in the UK where domestic fees have been stalled for years and costs have escalated, forcing several universities to cut entire departments with humanities and social science ones bearing the brunt – attracting fewer international students they are less self-sustaining than, say, business schools, in the eyes of the bean counters at least. The idea that universities should support “non profitable” but strategically and educationally significant programs disappeared years ago under severe financial pressures. In Britain’s case, that was aggravated further by BREXIT with schemes like ERASMUS no longer available to British students whose own overseas educational experiences suddenly became expensive.

And at this point, for the UK, Australia and Canada especially, there is a further geopolitical twist. For the past decade or so, China has been their number one provider of international students. Now, however, politically and strategically the PRC is cast as enemy number one. Fuelled by the Murdoch press and defence thinktank op-eds, the Australian government has vilified China on one hand, all the while keeping the other one open to receive the rivers of gold from iron ore sales and, of course, student fees.

That has been a tough, some would say unsuccessful balancing act whose final scenes are yet to be seen. The prime inclusion of universities in legislation against “foreign influence” (ie China) have not made things any easier, nor a recent set of actions against a Chinese national researcher in Australia on the grounds his work might aid Chinese repressive practices. Again, this is a complication not unique to Australia because Canada, the UK and the USA have all endured similar debates.

And yet another geopolitical turn enters here, because the looming main rival to China as an international student source is, of course, India which in recent years has become in all spheres the “must go to” place for the Australian government as, again, it has for Canada, the UK and the USA. The Australian situation reflects the general confusion that has now arisen. By definition, Indian visa numbers will have to drop under the new restrictive approach and, indeed have already done so by stealth – since late 2023, Australian immigration authorities have quietly disallowed a significantly greater number of applications than before.

Simultaneously, though, a newly established visa category will allow in young skilled Indian graduates, another apparent illogicality. As is the encouraging of Australian institutions to establish new campuses in India where they will be subject to Indian policies and practices that already draw criticism inside India, notably against the Modi government’s approaches to its substantial Muslim population and other minorities in addition to its alleged activities against dissidents in countries like the USA and Canada.

Presently, then, we have the situation where Australia, the USA, Canada and the UK criticise China on the grounds of human rights abuses, but a similar situation in India is seemingly overlooked because it is expedient to do so. This is scarcely sustainable at policy level let alone the international student recruitment and training one.

Unfortunately, this all now feeds into broader debates everywhere fuelled by on-campus strife emanating from the Israel-Gaza conflict. In the USA, Australia, the UK and Canada universities have become the scapegoat for the apparent rise of anti-Semitism and alleged pro-Hamas support that is exercising more moderate social quarters. Of course, this is a specific application of the ages-old idea that universities are the hotbeds of revolution (when university veterans and/or campus novel readers will tell you exactly the reverse is true – especially now that sixty percent or more of average university enrolments are in business courses). That in turn takes us back to the idea of “useful” university education programs, as opposed to supposedly dilettante ones with no immediate employment outcomes.

The central problem is that all of this connects directly to the rapidly escalating question about what a university education should or could be in the face of rapidly changing technologies, workplace demands, requirements and prospects, and the very future of work. This impacts on all disciplines ranging from arts to science, law to medicine, physics to business, IT to nursing. And it relates to curriculum formation and all the rest, indirectly at least having an angle for all those international students who might eventually be let in to study even under the rising restrictions.

So, what might we do to forestall some of these challenges?

The first need, perhaps, is for a genuinely “whole of government” planning approach – countries should not be wholesale restricting access for students from particular countries all the while privileging some of their counterparts, and/or reaping benefits from that other country’s economy. In turn, whole of country development policies should be created so that the role of higher education should be articulated alongside any aid and development or strictly commercial approach.

Then, there needs to be a serious and informed debate about what higher education is or might be - is it really to be a job placement agency in lieu of a decent skilled applied science alternative? Having so agreed on what high education should be, governments must fund the vision adequately so that international students do not simply become a means to an end for financially challenged institutions.

Whatever policies are finalised need to be transparent and authentic. No country should be covertly raising or lowering student entries from individual countries at the instance of an individual minister or ministers. And whatever policies are adopted must be communicated clearly and without ambiguity to home and international audiences alike. Those policies should also be developed with medium to long term outlooks and not for short term political expediency.

If these and related approaches are ignored, then international students in a host of countries will continue simply to subsidise broader university operations, be subject to the whims of passing political bosses, not gain the genuinely international experiences they deserve nor the skill to which they aspire. And their hosts will continue to miss out on the genuinely new perspectives those disadvantaged fee-payers bring.

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