Charles Sturt U is moving back to town – with a city campus in Sydney and one in Melbourne coming, pitched, in part, to international students.
It’s a change from 2021 when CSU bailed from the big smoke, committing to “an outstanding experience for international students and researchers at our regional campuses.”
Not, perhaps, outstanding enough to silence the siren songs of the cities and so CSU is back in town, competing against all the other HE providers that were there when it left.
Plus there’s a new player in the market, one which will make or break everybody’s international ed business. The Commonwealth Government wants to increase international enrolments in the bush.
“Government and education providers need to work more closely together to support the growth of the sector in regional areas of Australia,” is how the Department of Education puts it in the “Draft International Educations and Skills Strategic Framework,” (which reads less like a green paper than a directive).
The way to do that is in the Bill (now with a Senate committee) that empowers officials to cap student numbers by university and course.
Presumably these will be set by the imminent Australian Tertiary Education Commission, in negotiation with each institution. But what happens if international students want to study in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne, rather on a campus in a town they have never heard of? And what happens when a regional university is allowed more international places than it can fill at its country campus and accordingly wants to teach them in town? And if ATEC said no what would happen to the places?
There’s an obvious answer to such regulation – cap international student places by head, course and city, if the government insists, but leave it to a market to sort out where they go.
Andrew Norton makes the case for a cap and trade system, using bized, the most popular courses with internationals, as an example.
“If a provider just wants to buy an international student business place, there could be a national course place market. The purchaser would manage their provider-level cap by taking fewer students in other courses. If the purchaser wants business students to add to their total enrolments they would have to buy those places from a provider in their own region,” he writes.
Professor Norton suggests the government should set the rules and then leave running it to “firms that already run training systems.”
Which won’t happen, not while ATEC is around – there would be no point in creating a Brezhnevite bureaucracy and then allowing universities to do deals that suit them and students.
