After four years in Australia, Catherine Nguyen, a 20-year-old student from Ho Chi Minh City, says the country and its education system are starting to lose their charm.
Yes, she agrees with official student surveys that show most international students find Australia relatively “safe” and “friendly.” Yes, her education at the University of Melbourne is “high quality.” But Ms. Nguyen says something deeper has been missing. Halfway through her bachelor’s degree in commerce, she can’t give the country the kind of ringing endorsement it seeks, and perhaps needs.
“As international students, we come to Australia and observe all these patterns of culture, and we’re really intrigued by the differences,” she explains of her efforts to befriend Australian students. “However, we don’t see that Australians feel the same way, in the sense that they do not really appreciate us back.”
Ms. Nguyen is not alone in her views. While government surveys report that international students are content, a burgeoning foreign-student movement and a growing body of academic research suggest that the truth is more complicated.
In these forums, many students from China, India, and elsewhere report a range of experiences from feelings of loneliness to incidents of outright discrimination. They say they’re often left with the sense that Australia cares little for them beyond the amount of money they contribute to the economy.
“We’re more like a product than anything else. We’re something that Australia sells and gets money out of,” says Arfa Noor, a student from Pakistan who is president of the Council of International Students Australia.
Such attitudes come at a particularly critical time for Australia’s international-education sector. For 20 years, higher education here enjoyed consistent, enviable growth in foreign-student enrollments, rising 18 per cent per year from 2006 to 2009, when students from abroad made up 36 per cent of the 630,000 students enrolled in the university and vocational sectors.
That all came to an abrupt end after a spate of violent attacks against Indian students in 2009, which led to a government crackdown on “rogue” vocational colleges and the easy pathways to permanent residency they were peddling. As the government restricted student visas, the amount of money brought in through international-student enrollments plummeted 12.5 per cent in 18 months, to $15.2-billion (Australian). Damage to Australia’s reputation and a strengthened local dollar are thought to have contributed to the fall.
The attacks also began a very public conversation about the ways in which international students are treated in Australia.
Now the government has created an advisory council of eminent academics and businessmen and -women charged with developing a five-year strategy to reinvigorate international education. It has also formed a roundtable, now in its third year, to receive feedback directly from dozens of international students.
The international education sector has welcomed such efforts. But students and other observers want to see decision makers put more effort into ensuring that international students have positive experiences—academically, socially, and culturally—while in Australia.
“At the heart of the international-education industry, these are human beings who have basic human rights,” said Helen Szoke, who oversees racial-discrimination complaints for the Australian Human Rights Commission. She is drawing up a set of guiding principles on international students.
“Then, from a really practical perspective, you have to make sure that people who are coming to buy your services, at quite considerable cost and quite considerable benefit to universities, are completely looked after. The best thing we can do is give them a terrific experience, because they’re going to be the best advertisement for us when they return to their own countries.”
The Outsider
Being an outsider was hard for Ms. Nguyen, the University of Melbourne student. When she began having housing and financial trouble in her first year of studies, she says the situation became overwhelming.
In contrast to their domestic counterparts, whose tuition is heavily subsidized by the government, foreign students in Australia pay between $14,000 and $35,000 in annual tuition. The students also have to contend with a relatively high cost of living. Ms. Nguyen hoped to live in a residential college on campus but was shocked to discover the privilege would cost about $18,000 a year. She was looking at another $30,000 per year for tuition.
Although her parents had put aside money throughout their work lives for their daughter’s education, Ms. Nguyen knew the price tag was beyond her family’s means. A high-achieving student in high school, she pinned her hopes on obtaining a scholarship.
But the university did not respond to repeated requests for information on scholarship options, she says. Living in a tiny bedroom in a privately owned Melbourne apartment, she became stressed and confused. She negotiated a six-month leave of absence from the university and returned to Vietnam to contemplate her options.
Victor Liu, a 32-year-old man from Beijing, remembers his struggles while obtaining a marketing degree from Monash University in the early 2000s. He had an easier time cultivating close friendships with Australian students. Resentment arose, however, as he worked as a janitor and factory worker to pay for his education.
“It felt unfair,” Mr. Liu said. “I had to pay a huge amount of money for the uni fee, and because I was working it was my obligation to pay taxes. Then there was an Australian student living in the same house as me, and he didn’t do any work and he was living on a government benefit.”
In time, both students found ways to navigate through most of their difficulties. Now an Australian citizen, Mr. Liu, who works as a technology business analyst for Monash, said he learned to accept the cultural variations between China and Australia and altered his “Asian thinking” and behavior to fit in. Ms. Nguyen pleaded her case in a letter to the vice chancellor, and the University of Melbourne came through with a faculty scholarship that tempted her back. The scholarship covers about half her tuition; she pays the rest of her expenses with her parents’ life savings.
Despite their improved situations, however, they and other students argue that Australia—now in sixth decade of deliberately recruiting students from abroad—has more work to do if it wants to keep attracting them in high numbers.
“It’s difficult for international students, that’s always been a fact, but the universities and government don’t do much to help,” said Mr. Liu. “All I did in the past came from personal effort. They didn’t do anything at all to give me more of a chance, or a program to make me feel more at home.”
Bleeding Students?
Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne, has researched the Australian international-student experience extensively. More than half the students who were the subject of a study he undertook in 2005 said they had experienced racism or discrimination here; two-thirds reported feelings of social isolation.
Mr. Marginson agrees that Australian institutions do not pay enough attention to student welfare. “The thing that worries me is the political economy of the sector drives us to extract every last dollar from each international student, so we can pour that money into research, primarily, and push up the rankings and maintain our brand value,” he said.
“These aren’t secrets, they’re not propaganda, everyone knows they’re true—that we bleed international-student fees as far as we can for these other purposes.”
Foreign students in Australia are increasingly well organized. On one level, the students want many of the basics that Australian citizens enjoy—standardized health-care coverage, affordable housing, equitable school fees for dependents, and the right to vote in local elections. They have also called for a better-trained urban police presence.
Their biggest and most emotive fight, however, is over travel concessions.
For decades the states of Victoria and New South Wales have refused to extend the same discounts to international students that domestic undergraduates receive for public bus and train fares. The issue is reignited regularly at conferences and in the media and policy documents. The states argue that they can’t afford to give the concessions, and higher-education associations and international students argue that the states can’t afford to not give them.
For international students, the issue is symbolic of the day-to-day discrimination they say they often feel. “It’s about fairness. It adds to the perception that the government doesn’t care and sees international students as cash cows,” said Wesa Chau, who helped found the Australian Federation of International Students in Melbourne 10 years ago.
Of course, travel concessions have pragmatic benefits, too. Advocates say they would make a big difference to tight budgets, enough so that more international students would ride public transport instead of risking their safety by walking home after work or a night out.
The lines of responsibility for student welfare in Australia are blurred, to say the least. The University of Melbourne, which has doubled its foreign-student population since 2001 to about 12,000, employs 13 full-time staff in an international-student services division to help. Aid services range from financial to housing, disability, employment, and counseling.
But Margaret Loh, a senior international-student adviser who assists hundreds of students on campus every year, said more was needed."There needs to be a discussion at much higher levels to really work out, what is international education? Is it a ‘cash cow’ because the federal government is squeezing down funding to universities, or do we really want to embrace this notion of knowledge transfer across the world? Are we playing a global citizen role? What are we?” Ms. Loh said.
As universities watch enrollment numbers closely, such questions will form part of the work of the federal government’s business and academic advisory council.
Among other things, the council is promising to examine ways to improve engagement between international students and local students and communities. Also on the agenda is how services—including the travel concessions—can be delivered more consistently nationwide. Ms. Noor, the Council of International Students Australia president, says having student issues addressed nationally is a significant and hopeful development.
“It’s going to take awhile for the whole industry to change its point of view,” she said. “But there has been a big change in the way the conversations are taking places and a lot more conversation about student support.”
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