Australia Parents Of International Students Lost Billion Of Dollars Of Their Hard Earned Money Being Treated Like Commodity With Dwindling Enrollment Whereas Govt Political Statement Rather Than Arranging Quarantine Quickly Plus China Govt Advising Students To Avoid Australia Complicated With Less 260,000 Student This And No Hope New Students Replacing The Huge Gap Forcing Universities To Fire Staff As 30% Revenue Coming From International Students Who Were Not Offered Any Relief Like Jobkeeper Despite Govt Earning Billion From This 4th Largest Export.

‘I feel like a commodity’: COVID hit only beginning for Australia’s universities, The sharp fall in international students, the hits to university revenue, and an apparently unfriendly government, have exacerbated an existential crisis. So whither Australia’s universities?

COVID-19 has smashed higher education in Australia, our closed borders a disaster for universities that have grown reliant on international student fees for as much as a third of their revenue.

The sector has already lost billions and responded by axing thousands of jobs and subjects. The futures of students, foreign and domestic, hang in the balance.

Worse is to come as COVID-19 and souring relations with China converge as a major threat to Australia’s fourth-largest – and Victoria’s largest – export industry. Yet from the outset of the pandemic, the Morrison government has seemed unfussed by the sector’s plight.

It told international students to “go home” and universities to become less reliant on them. It denied public universities access to COVID-19 job subsidies, cracked down on partnerships with foreign countries and changed federal funding rules to more than double fees for arts studies such as politics and communications.

In January last year 30,000 international students poured through Melbourne Airport to prepare for the academic year on Victorian campuses. This January there were 70. There are now 260,000 fewer international students living in Australia than before the pandemic.

The dearth of students in our streets has pummelled university coffers and the local economy, especially in Victoria and the Melbourne CBD where foreign students represented 40 per cent of a booming pre-COVID population.

The crisis and beyond

Di Zhang had completed just one year of her strategic communications management course at Monash when she flew to China in January 2020 for a family holiday. She hasn’t been back.

For the rest of the year the 24-year-old paid $17,500 per semester for a course she was forced to do online without the teaching support and cultural experience that drew her to Melbourne in the first place.

“It’s already been a year and they [Australian governments] don’t have any arrangements for international students to come back,” Zhang says from her home in China’s Shaanxi province . “I don’t think Australia has given international students much hope.”

In January last year 30,000 international students poured through Melbourne Airport to prepare for the academic year on Victorian campuses. This January there were 70. There are now 260,000 fewer international students living in Australia than before the pandemic.

The dearth of students in our streets has pummelled university coffers and the local economy, especially in Victoria and the Melbourne CBD where foreign students represented 40 per cent of a booming pre-COVID population