Turning off the tap

Very interesting article from the age:

Over the past 18 months a number of factors have led to a fall in the number of overseas students wanting to study in Australia. And universities, which rely on international student fees after years of government underfunding, are panicking.

Education observers around the world are now questioning whether Australia's business model for international education was such a good one after all.

Commentators such as Horst Albert Glaser, emeritus professor at Germany's University of Duisburg-Essen, are also questioning the morality of taking fees from foreign students from developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region to prop up Australian universities.

But in Australia such issues do not take centre stage. What's brewing here is deep frustration among universities that recent government policy changes are fuelling the drop-off in foreign students.

In an attempt to stamp out visa rorting, and weaken the link between immigration and education, the federal government last year introduced more stringent rules governing student visas, and tightened immigration regulations.

That has caused a slowdown in the rate of foreign students starting courses. As the problem worsens there is growing disquiet in Victoria's universities that the honey pot is drying up.

The issue is a political hot potato because universities rely on foreign student fees for an average of 16 per cent of their total funding, and use much of that revenue to cross-subsidise domestic students.

As Stephen King, dean of the business and economics faculty at Monash, suggested on the website Core Economics recently: ''If you are an undergraduate HECS student and you are sitting next to a foreign fee-paying student, turn to them and say 'thank you'. After all, they are paying for your education.''

He warns: ''If the university sector ends up in financial crisis it is taxpayers who will be bailing them out.''

Melbourne University's higher education expert, Simon Marginson, argues the downturn is primarily due to immigration policy changes, not a fall in demand, though that is also occurring.

''This export industry cannot be expected to grow forever,'' he says, ''and the long-term quality and reputation of Australian international education, including its commercial capacity, depends on the resources we put into it.''

Melbourne University education economist Ross Williams likens the government's strangling of the supply of foreign students to a ''tap being turned off a little''.

He predicts the damage to universities will reverberate through the economy, with fewer foreign students affecting property prices (since foreign students form a large part of the rental market) and dampening demand for ancillary services such as cafes around universities.

Universities heavily reliant on international students are on shaky ground. Central Queensland University is the most vulnerable as it relies on foreign students for 44 per cent of total revenue.

Victorian institutions at risk are Ballarat University (31 per cent), RMIT University (26 per cent) and Swinburne University of Technology (20 per cent). The picture is not much rosier for larger universities such as Monash University (18 per cent), Melbourne University (16 per cent) and La Trobe University (13 per cent).

Monash University is bracing for a 5 per cent fall in foreign student enrolments next year and a 10 per cent drop the year after.

Vice-chancellor Ed Byrne says university budgets are feeling the squeeze. ''There's been a systematic underfunding of domestic students, so no Australian university gets enough money from government or fees to pay our costs,'' he says. ''Our costs are dependent on the international markets, so not only do international students bring vast economic earnings to the state, not only do they contribute culturally enormously to our campuses, they also are key factors in university budgets in this country.

''For a state like Victoria, I think this is potentially the most serious economic thing on the horizon.'' International education is Victoria's top export earner, bringing in $5.8 billion last year.

At Swinburne University, foreign student numbers are down 10 per cent on last year. Forecasts for next year suggest that will shrink to about 80 per cent of 2009 levels. Vice-chancellor Ian Young believes the government must encourage more international students to come to Australia.

''The real danger in Australia is sending a message out into the market that we're really not interested in having international students come to Australia. So the market is basically voting with their feet and saying if [Australia] doesn't want us, there are other places we can go,'' he says.

Foreign student numbers are reasonably steady at La Trobe University says international director Liz Stinson, but the university is planning for a drop.

''I personally think we have been let down. We have done our darndest to both deliver high-quality education and to obey the law … We've all been working away at this for 10 years and I think there is a collective sense in the industry that we have been let down by government,'' she says.

In a sign of growing alarm, the Group of Eight leading universities has warned that a crippling downturn in foreign student numbers would imperil universities.

They have called on politicians to take urgent action to pull the international education industry from the brink of potential disaster. They want changes to student visa arrangements to ensure legitimate students are not discouraged from applying to Australia.

And they argue that tightening visas to deal with problems in the training sector, particularly so-called dodgy colleges, has resulted in ''collateral damage'' to universities.

John Phillimore from the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy at Curtin University says a slump in foreign student numbers would lead to massive job losses, increased class sizes and fewer courses.

Any suggestion that universities are just crying wolf was put to rest in a recent report by Professor Phillimore and fellow Curtin University colleague Paul Koshy, which warns of alarming consequences if the government does not reconsider its policies. In a description of the worst-case scenario - ''the perfect storm'' - they warn that by 2015 foreign student enrolments in higher education could plunge from about 214,000 in 2010 to about 148,000 in 2015, resulting in 36,182 fewer jobs and a collapse of $7 billion in university revenues.

Professor Phillimore told The Age the perfect storm scenario was a plausible outcome.

In the past 18 months, a cocktail of factors have conspired to put international education under severe pressure. They include a stronger Australian dollar, the impact of the global financial crisis, and fierce competition from countries such as the US.

Australia's reputation as a study destination has also taken a hammering, with attacks on foreign students, the collapse of private colleges, the immigration debate during the election campaign and tougher student visa rules.

''The impact of most of these factors has yet to be fully felt,'' the Curtin report warns. However, there are already signs of flattening demand. Government data shows foreign student enrolments in higher education are down 6.3 per cent for the year to June 2010.

Enrolments in English language courses are hardest hit, falling more than 20 per cent. Reports from student recruitment agents suggest enrolments could fall by up to 40 per cent. This is alarming for universities as English language courses are a pathway to higher education in subsequent years. Similarly, immigration data shows visas granted to students applying from overseas fell by a staggering 25 per cent in 2009-10.

David Buckingham, principal adviser to the office of the vice- chancellor at Monash University, is worried.

''The administrative conditions imposed by the Australian visa system are actually far more onerous than [those that] apply with competitor countries,'' he says. ''It's treating the students and their families almost as if they are money launderers, rather than those who are actually prepared to pay a significant amount in the education of their children.''

Under current visa arrangements, the family of a Chinese student wanting to do an undergraduate course at Monash would need to show it had up to $150,000 in the bank for six months before the date of the visa application, he says.

In comparison, Britain requires students to show a bank deposit of about $40,000 held for 28 days. The US merely asks the student to show adequate funds for self-sufficiency.

No one is arguing that we need to go back to days of easy visas, he says, but ''the visa system should be geared to sort the wheat from the chaff''.

In the absence of government action, universities such as Melbourne University are doing what they can to prepare for hard times ahead.

Deputy vice-chancellor global engagement Sue Elliott says: ''[Considering] the outlook for 2011 and particularly 2012, we are concerned. We are intensifying our engagement with schools, and internationally, but we are also seeking to diversify our student source countries as well.''

RMIT deputy vice-chancellor international Stephen Connelly is also president of the International Education Association of Australia. He wants to see the establishment of a parliamentary secretary for international education.

''What's happening now is a reaction to decisions by government that have been ill informed and poorly implemented with no overarching strategy and no vision. If they got those things right there wouldn't be a problem,'' he says.

In response to questions from The Age last week, then immigration minister Chris Evans defended the government's visa changes. He said the government would work collaboratively with the sector to ''ensure these reforms strike the right balance between making the visa application process easier for genuine students, while imposing appropriate checks on those who may seek to abuse the system''.

In the Gillard government's new ministerial line-up Chris Bowen takes over as immigration minister while the education portfolio is split, into schools, skills and tertiary education. Chris Evans has the skills and tertiary education portfolio and both ministers can expect intense lobbying by universities.

In the meantime, Melbourne University's Professor Marginson, is adamant that Australia would provide a stronger university education to local and international students if the quality of teaching and research could be guaranteed through adequate government funding.

It's a view shared by educators who argue foreign students' greatest attribute is not their ability to pay fees. Says Melbourne's Sue Elliott: ''If we were not reliant on international students for income, we would still seek to have international students in our classrooms from across the world … [the true value] is those very important links that are made. Those sorts of connections are priceless.''

Those priceless connections are now at stake as questions about the morality of using developing countries to fund education in Australia loom large. Professor Marginson notes the morality issue is rarely discussed.

''A sign,'' he says, ''of how our one-sided and almost solely commercial approach to international education has emptied out the moral content of our educational relationship with the Asia-Pacific region.''

Overseas student numbers plummet

The fall in international student commencements accelerated in July as numbers from India plummeted with the crackdown on student visa fraud and tougher migration policies.

The falls are hitting vocational and English language courses heavily but these also feed students into universities, which are braced for the effects as well.

The figures, compiled by Australian Education International, have been revealed as the international education sector lobbies government for support and for adjustments to be made to the visa rulings.

Year-to-date new student commencements across the whole international sector were down 7.4 per cent at the end of July compared with a year ago.

The English college sector was worst hit, with a fall of 23 per cent, while the vocational sector dropped 8.6 per cent.

The drop is mainly in registrations from India, where much of the visa fraud had been concentrated. Year-to-date commencements from India have fallen by 20,000 students, or 40 per cent, to 30,500.

Melbourne University migration expert Lesleyanne Hawthorne said the vocational and English college sectors were experiencing a necessary reversal after fast growth as students and colleges took advantage of the previous study to migration pathway.

The old system awarded bonus points for permanent residency for a plethora of courses, including hairdressing and cookery.

However, the government's recent changes would keep students intent on migrating focused on doing quality courses and securing employee sponsorship, she said.

"We are having a shake-out that was inevitable. The steps that have been taken federally to say enrolment in an Australian course isn't an automatic entitlement to permanent residency was a necessary statement," Professor Hawthorne said.

(source: The Australian)
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/overseas-student-numbers-plummet/story-e6frg6nf-1225913528166

Commencements in the higher education sector, however, were up 5.6 per cent.

Internationalisation of Business Schools: A thought from AMLE

The forces that have limited the internationalization of higher education generally and business school globalization in particular, especially in the United States, are numerous and complex. At the broadest level, they include the same factors that
have traditionally limited the globalization of U.S.business: a large, prosperous, and somewhat isolated domestic market for goods and services.They also include the relatively recent advent of technologies to allow for the full globalization of
services as described above. But given that many U.S. companies are now fully globalized—“transnational” in the Bartlett and Ghoshal sense—it seems time, indeed overdue, for U.S. business schools to follow suit.

Business schools and their leaders themselves recognize this shortfall. Indeed, at an AACSB meeting in early 2009, Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at IESE Business School, suggested that most of the cross-border collaborations among
business schools offered little genuine integration of courses and curricula, remarking, “If that’s all we do, we risk becoming a specialized segment of the travel and hospitality industry (Mangan, 2009: pa.9). Edward A. Snyder, then dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said,

”It’s time to stop pretending that we’re doing more than we really are“ (Mangan, 2009: A29).

Blair H. Sheppard,dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, has probably offered the boldest response to these critiques, pushing forward with an
expanded version if its ”cross-continent MBA,” under which students spend significant periods working and studying at campuses in Britain, China, India, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Duke’s main campus in North
Carolina (Mangan, 2009). But on balance, business schools in the United States and around the world have not progressed very far in terms of their globalization,
even as other private, public, and nonprofit organizations have. AMLE has provided a platform for research, debate, and discussion of the challenges of globalizing
U.S. (and non-U.S.) business schools and of the related phenomenon of the internationalization of management curriculum.

In the very first issue of Academy of Management (Learning and Education aka AMLE), Henry Mintzberg and Jonathan Gosling (2002) reflected on a “new” approach to management education as exemplified in the International Masters Program in Practicing Management (IMPPM), which included collaboration among business schools in India, France, the U.K., Canada, Japan, and Korea.

They argued that living and working in different contexts allow managers to “live cross-cultural experiences as authentically as possible” (Mintzberg& Gosling, 2002: 66). Yet, since this article was published, AMLE has featured relatively few
papers that have addressed this important topic. While some potential contributions may have been “left on the floor” as a result of the review process, we need much more innovative thinking around this topic. I see great potential for exploring
questions such as

• What is a global business school? How should it be defined? How can “globalness” (in the business school context) be measured?
• What mechanisms exist for advancing global business education? How can success and failure of these efforts be measured?

Just a thought :)

US News Business School Ranking (Marketing)

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Marketing
Ranked in 2010

1 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL

2 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA

3 Duke University (Fuqua) Durham, NC

4 Stanford University Stanford, CA

5 Harvard University Boston, MA

6 Columbia University New York, NY
University of Chicago (Booth) Chicago, IL

8 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI

9 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA

10 University of California--Los Angeles (Anderson) Los Angeles, CA

International Students and Racism

As a former international students and a teacher who has been working with international students in the last 3-4 years, I can't stand some attitudes that my students have to put up with. I am not saying that most of them had experienced racism. Some of them do..and racism comes in different forms. I found this excerpt from the Australia Association of Social Science and it motivates me to write about this topic. I states:

"International students are often viewed only in terms of their economic usefulness to the host country, and the focus is on expenditure, rather than their income situation. Although street crime victimisation is reported, there are many other types of crimes or abuses and perpetrators: employers who exploit, educational colleges which behave rapaciously and unethically, the behaviour of some immigration agents and landlords, to name a few. For example, some landlords, it is claimed will not rent to Indian students. This constitutes racial discrimination. There have been claims of landlords expecting sex for rent (and sometimes in addition to rent). There are cases of exploitation through overcrowding, poor conditions such as no smoke alarms.
Understanding the context of the student can complete the policy picture."

This is ridiculous form any points of view. What can we do to protect our students? I, personally, think that the University and State government MUST work together to protect our students. I know this is seen as an old-fashioned argument by some people but, to me, it is the sustain way to protect our student and to ensure we provide a fair service to them, while they are in our country.

International Education Industry

Due to greater mobility of people, social and technology revolutions, and emerging market of foreign degrees, the higher education sector has transformed tremendously. In this scenario, Australia’s effective position taking strategies in global higher education has resulted in the increase of overseas student population from 1% to 9% between 1993 and 2003 (AEI, 2005a; Marginson, 2007) Australia also has the advantage of its global geostrategic location which positions it as the nearest Anglo-Saxon country to Asia Pacific. Thus providing Asian students a regional alternative for Anglo-American education (Marginson, 2007). Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Indonesia and India are among the top source countries for Australian higher education (Mazzarol & Hosie, 1996). Mazzarol (2006) predicts that there are significant possibilities for Australia to utilize education as global positioning good for the students from Asia Pacific region.

America and UK are the leading host countries for international education securing 28% and 12% respectively of the proportion of world’s foreign students (OECD; 2005, as cited in Marginson, 2006, p25). Consequently Australian government terms them as Australia’s major competitors in international education (AEI, 2005b). The global positional market of education is fashioned by the US positional market. US host 26 of the top 40 research universities of the world (SJTIHE, 2004, as cited in Marginson, 2006). Thus prove to be the top destination for the prospective international students. However, America’s supremacy in the global scenario of international education is not sustained by active marketing strategies but is a byproduct of the quality of its research universities as well as the most important factor of it being a super power, politically as well as economically. Because of lack of active marketing, global war and visa issues, in 2003-2004 the foreign student enrolment in US experienced a sharp decline of 2.4 percent (IIE 2004, as cited in Marginson, 2006). After 9/11 and Iraq war, US universities also experienced decline in the student enrolment form Muslim countries, whereas in Australia it increased significantly (Marginson, 2007). Despite current trends in the decline of international student enrolment in US universities, America remains to be the world leader in education and will continue to be the standard by which the quality of education will be judged worldwide. In this context the Melbourne’s Vice Chancellors forum’s decision to make efforts to position Melbourne as a knowledge city comparable to Boston seems to be logical and plausible.

In the face of this unidirectional global competition, segmenting the Asia-Pacific region, India and Muslim countries for future marketing strategies may prove to be the success factor in sustaining the multi billion dollar industry of international education in Australia. However targeting potential students in these countries pose additional questions as to what are the factors that motivate a student to select a particular foreign study destination. Gray, Fam & Llanes (2003), conducted a research in three countries, namely Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore, investigating the motivational factors that inspire students in making study destination choices and the media they use to gain information about foreign universities. They used five brand positioning dimensions which can play a role in inspiring prospective international students, ‘university’s learning environment (including excellent staff, facilities and research resources), reputation (including brand name, achievements and high standard of education), graduate career prospects (including graduated’ employment prospects and expected income, and employers’ views of graduates), destination image (including political stability, safety and hospitality) and cultural integration (including religious freedom and cultural diversity)’ (p.115). Gray et al found that graduate career prospects and reputation were the common motivating factors among the three nations reviewed. Moderate importance was given to the university’s learning environment and destination image. And cultural integration issues were given the least importance.

Global Marketing for Australian Education

I have received a number of emails from the readers of "Global Marketing for Australian Education". One of the questions is why do we need to think about marketing for education? Shouldn't education be free?

As an author of the book, I would like to share with you my intention when I wrote this book. It was not my intention to promote the concept of hard marketing for international education service. In fact, I have been interested in product development, communication improvement and transnational education offer. Thus, the book focuses on how to develop proper international education service to students from around the world. This book also focuses on consumer behavior by examining international students and various reference groups. It is my hope that we will not use marketing to manipulate students. We, on the other hand, should learn how to improve the quality of international education services.

** The book is available online at
www.amazon.com

www.amazon.co.uk

Book on Demand