Team up to survive ‘big 30’ threat, Australian universities told

Australian universities must band together to preserve the vestiges of their once-thriving international education industry, as a proliferation of competitor countries occupies the vacuum created by government crackdowns in the “big four” international education destinations, a Sydney forum has heard.

Former Griffith University pro vice-chancellor Sarah Todd said talk of the “big four” had evolved to the “big 14” and now the “big 30”, as emerging players from Greece and Italy to Turkey and Saudi Arabia marketed themselves on national traits rather than as individual institutions.

Todd said competitor nations were building reputations as welcoming countries with high-quality courses, academics, campuses and pathways – characteristics Australia had always prided itself on – backed by governments that saw international education as a “saviour” to workforce shortages and declining enrolments in their demographically challenged university sectors.

She said Australia needed to focus on its “core proposition” and revisit the idea of “going out and recruiting together. This is what the emerging destinations are doing,” Todd told the Australian International Education Conference.

“They’re banding together. They’re narrowing the options…down for students and helping them with making those decisions, whereas we’ve moved into a hyper-competitive environment.”

Todd said would-be international students had deferred their study plans during the coronavirus pandemic, waiting for the “great bounce back” of 2022 and 2023. “What we’re seeing now…partly because of this rapid uplift in the number of destinations [is that] students are less likely to delay or wait for a better environment.”

Analytics company Quacquarelli Symonds, where Todd now works as principal Australian consultant, has forecast that the big four’s share of international students will decline to roughly 35 per cent by 2030, with “only the UK experiencing growth”.

Meanwhile, half a million additional students will enrol across another 10 or so emerging destinations.

Tim Field, international director at the University of Sydney, said he was struggling to get over the “nostalgia” of his once-buoyant student flows, as countries such as Greece emerged as competitors.

Promotional organisation Study in Greece has a global recruitment strategy buttressed by government-backed scholarships, Field said. “We’re competing…as institutions with our individual scholarships. These emerging markets are going in as a brand. They have a very different idea of what they want to do. We’re not playing in the same space. We have to adjust.”

Erika Huesser, director of operations with the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in the US, said competition within international education was shifting from “a university perspective, competing within the same destination, to multiple destinations competing with one another”.

Huesser said ETS had observed “incredible increases” in students’ interest in East Asian destination countries, including “year on year” growth of 20 per cent for Japan, 30 per cent for Hong Kong and 50 per cent for South Korea. “Student ambition is not changing,” she told the conference. “What is changing is the ability to realise those ambitions in different locations.”

Huesser said that under Germany’s Comprehensive Mobility and Migration Partnership Agreement with India, students from the subcontinent received visa fee waivers and generous work rights, including up to 18 months to find employment after graduating. Meanwhile Canada had jettisoned its Student Direct Stream, which offered fast visa processing.

“Students [are] not really asking if they can get to university,” she said. “They’re asking if they can get into a country, and if they do, can they stay there?”

Koala News founder Dirk Mulder said students were comparing institutions, countries and education models against each other in increasingly “sophisticated” ways. “That changes the balance of power,” he told the conference.

“The rise of a new destination does not automatically mean the collapse of an established one. The growth of Europe doesn’t mean the end of Australia. The rise of Asian destinations doesn’t mean that students will stop going to North America or the UK. What it means is that the market is becoming more competitive, more fragmented and potentially much more dynamic.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com