An unprecedented number of Australian universities are withdrawing from overseas ventures, although the nation’s institutions now enroll tens of thousands of fee-paying foreign students.
The downward trend, which was first reported in The Australian newspaper, follows the collapse of the country’s highest-profile overseas program to date, a fully fledged campus in Singapore that closed its doors in late June after fewer than half the expected number of students had enrolled for the first two semesters. The imminence of closures or cutbacks affecting dozens of smaller partnerships and operations abroad has also been reported.
Australia’s 40 universities enroll 200,000 foreign students, of whom about 60,000 study in 1,500 offshore programs, mostly campus partnerships in Southeast Asia, representing the fastest-growing area of the country’s vaunted $4-billion international higher-education market.
But the same sector has also been dogged by allegations of lax academic standards and lack of appropriate financial oversight.
In the wake of the closure of the prominent Singapore campus, UNSW Asia, which was administered by the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, it has been revealed that dozens of other programs abroad are being significantly downsized or terminated altogether.
‘A General Shakeout’
New South Wales’s own offshore operations had already dwindled from 20 to two in the five years before last month’s closure of the ill-starred Singapore venture. At least another half-dozen internationally oriented institutions have experienced a similar downward trend.
The University of Southern Queensland confirmed last week that nearly one-third of its 37 offshore programs had recently been culled, with more cuts likely in the near future.
“I’m not going to tell you that there’s not a general shakeout going on of international operations within the sector at the moment,” said Tim Fowler, Southern Queensland’s international pro vice chancellor, blaming a “very flat” demand expected for admissions and increased scrutiny by the Australian government’s quality-assurance controllers.
“And frankly,” added Mr. Fowler, “that’s not a bad bloody thing — we want to professionalize the international sector of higher education, and part of that is going to mean bringing in more-rigorous systems and processes and models in order to enhance the way we work.”
Curtin University of Technology, another of Australia’s major international-student recruiters, has cut three of its Asian programs, although an official of the Perth-based institution said the university was looking at establishing programs in Malaysia and the Philippines.
“We’re still upbeat,” said Kevin McKenna, Curtin’s international pro vice chancellor. He declined to name the institutions affected by Curtin’s recent closures.
Central Queensland University has also terminated several of its overseas programs, winding up operations in Singapore and China as well as in Fiji, ostensibly because of military unrest there. Those closures will affect several hundred students.
For the Good?
Roger Peacock, a consultant involved in an audit of Southern Queensland’s operations and a former director of several international-outreach ventures, said that relatively few Australian institutions had made “entirely rational” business plans for all their overseas arrangements, and that the current process was probably for the good.
“There’s been a kind of triumphalism” on the part of universities in delivering programs overseas, said Mr. Peacock, “when in reality what has happened has been Australia lucking out in the flux of history” in terms of an international demand for degrees, beginning in the late 1980s, that has since become more sophisticated.
Tony Adams, until recently an international administrator at Macquarie University, in New South Wales, agreed. Asked about his country’s global recruitment prospects, he said: “The lesson is that if you’re not committed to it, don’t do it.”
The Australian Universities Quality Agency, which audits the country’s higher-education institutions and since 2002 has cited more than 10 universities as having academically weak arrangements abroad, played a “constructive” role in ushering in the pullback, said Mr. Adams.
Nevertheless, he predicted that while the shakeout will probably mean fewer Australian institutions competing internationally for students against their counterparts in Europe and North America, a smaller number of Australian universities might soon be running much larger, centralized programs.
“The fringes — you know, the type of programs where a couple of academics get together with a partner and start a master’s degree or something, and the costing hasn’t been done properly — are fading,” he said. “But what we will probably see now is a new generation of more substantial programs.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 53, Issue 46, Page A32
