International higher education is driving Australia’s growth

Globally, the higher education industry is in a flux. More so in developed nations like USA and the UK where rising costs of higher education is attracting fewer and fewer students to universities within their own borders.

Hence, these US and UK universities have had no choice but to woo more and more international students, typically, from Asian countries like China and India. Even then, they face strong competition from other English-speaking countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand which see tremendous opportunities in building their own higher education sectors.

Australia, for instance, has been a higher education destination for Asian students for many years. It witnessed a drastic fall in international student enrollments after 2009 when immigration laws and student visa policies were tightened; but has put new strategies in place recently to ease and expedite student visa applications and offer limited work permits to international students after graduation.

Image courtesy http://www.australia.edu

The Australian government sees higher education as a promising and profitable export service, and is encouraging individual as well as state-wise universities to formulate their own higher education strategies. The international student community – particularly from Asian countries – is responding well to Australia’s invitation, and enrollments to Australian universities have shown an increase in the past two years.

These Australian universities, which had earlier relied entirely on local (i.e. Asian) foreign education agents with university representatives visiting Asian countries now and then as a support service, are now investing in student recruitment and marketing offices and officers of their own, locally, in countries like China and India. This had been a practice for a few Australian universities for the past six years or so, but many more Australian universities are making this investment now.

In an online article, titled Foreign students set to power housing, in The Age dated 4 August 2015, Michael Pascoe writes, “…foreign student numbers are rising sharply and predicted to regain and surpass the record 2009 level of some 120,000 in two years and then keep going.” He continues with “The foreign-students boom is a fine thing for the Australian education industry and the overall economy. It should drive substantial investment in education – some of the urgently required and missing-in-action non-mining investment.”

In fact, Mr Pascoe sums up this happy boom in Australian higher education sentiment very aptly in his article’s first paragraph: “Education is one of the stars of Australia’s rising export services sector and one that has an often overlooked multiplier on the tourism side.” Mr Pascoe feels this boom may also affect the housing sector in Australia. He writes, “It also looks like being the source of the next wave of housing price pressure, especially in Sydney and Melbourne hotspots.”

Mr Pascoe sums up this sentiment as well with “Such strong growth also means further urgent need for investment in student housing.”

[Citation: Foreign students set to power housing, Michael Pascoe, The Age, 4 August 2015.]