Overseas students flee Oz’s future

This means wages will go up. While blue-ribbon firms are able to sustain these high salaries, medium to low-tier firms can’t meet rising wage expectations and that’s a major problem. If you can’t get the right people, you go broke.

In the early 90s I taught communications at RMIT to local and international students. I was the first academic at RMIT to start transcribing lectures for the international students. I thought back then that the mass international education model was setting itself up to fail. Its strengths were its weaknesses. The huge number of students effectively meant there could be no individual service.

And if you’re paying $80,000 in fees, you want individual service as a minimum. Also, by educating literally millions of people in the Asia Pacific region, it has taken only two generations before universities in Hong Kong, Singapore and China have approached the teaching standards of our mid level institutions. In short, we were teaching tomorrow’s lecturers and teachers. This is how it should be.

I fear Vice Chancellors who look to the Gillard Government for help will not find much succour. While it is early days, the rise of the Greens and Independents may herald a tighter rather than looser approach to regulation with little interest in product differentiation in tertiary education and university research.