Yes, but what kind of University? Considering the new MCD University of Divinity

[From the keynote address at the Melbourne College of Divinity Staff Day, November 2 2011]

Many MCD faculty members here undertook a first degree in Australia, most at an institution that was called a University, in an era when that title made a particular statement about the character and quality of the teaching and learning experience, and its relationship to research. Across Australia, students riding on a tram on Swanston St in Melbourne, or in a bus on Stirling Highway in Perth, had the same expectation of taking part in a comparable, fairly uniform, high quality, and relatively exclusive experience.

This changed with John Dawkins' Higher Education White Paper in 1988, and the consequent reforms which, with a few strokes of the pen, expanded Australia's university sector dramatically. Some of this was badge-engineering, but there was a new intention that the former institutes of technology and colleges of advanced education, as well as both new and historic universities, function as research-focussed institutions, as well as maintaining high standards of teaching.

The general tenor of higher education policies then and still today assumes a relatively uniform, but larger and hence more accessible, set of experiences, standards and outcomes. Viewed from far enough away, there is some truth to this; we may affirm that the educational bottom lines for Australian universities are generally good, and most have some high-quality research being undertaken too.

But up close the reality is different, and more like that former world than some wish to admit. The recent Excellence in Research For Australia (ERA) exercise was one indicator. In terms of research, the Group of 8 universities plus a few others succeed in research funding and outcomes across a broad range of disciplines, but most Australian universities succeed in fewer and more specific areas, and a few languish without areas of apparent research excellence. University of Melbourne researcher Simon Marginson observed that this signalled the failure of the research-teaching nexus.

On the other hand, the experiences of teaching and learning may not really be as comparable across institutions as some imagine either. It is sobering that the institutions which get highest ratings for teaching from their graduates in a measure like the Good Universities Guide are usually a quite different group from the research leaders identified in measures like the Shanghai Jiao Tong ratings.

All this is to say that membership of this group called "universities" says something, but not nearly everything, and not nearly enough to substitute for answers we will have to find ourselves now that the Melbourne College of Divinity has been approved for university status.

There are however some ways university status can and will affect us, which we must seize as challenges and opportunities. Two things worth considering are the research-teaching nexus, despite what I have just noted, and the public character of the university.

Among the many institutions teaching theology in some form in Australia, university status is not overly common, and of course there is no other specialized university at all. Under today's regulatory and policy frameworks however, university status does not in and of itself say that we are necessarily better than non-university "providers".

What university status for the MCD does affirm is that we embody the research-teaching nexus that is supposed to characterize Australian universities generally, which is the one distinctive that Australian higher education policy claims, or aspire to, for entities using that title.

The ways this really works for many universities has been questioned above, but this is something we in the MCD actually do quite well, and have been confirmed as doing by the recent VRQA panel in ways that some public universities might actually find it hard to match. Whether or not the VRQA or its replacement TEQSA see it in these terms, it means not only that we have a good research profile (according to the ERA a smaller but better one than the average achievement of most Australian universities, in fact), but that we teach with skill, committment and passion, and inform that teaching by our scholarship.

I think this is one thing that really may be unique about us among specifically-theological institutions, and we ought not merely to celebrate its recognition by VRQA, but consider how to defend and strengthen it beyond what an outside quality assurance process sees. Their approbation is valuable, but not enough.

I also noted the question of a university's public character. We have been a public institution in a sense, since being established under an Act of Parliament in 1910, but it is clearer that a university is by its nature and name a public institution. The MCD has a strong and established ethos of serving the Churches and religious orders, and our individual students regardless of their religious affiliations, but we now have to ask how we serve the Australian public.

We stand historically at a point where Australia's religious illiteracy is increasingly manifest, as we lurch between poles of aggressive secularism and rising fundamentalism in public discourse. We have a massive opportunity and imperative to foster conversations about religion that has the virtues of moderation and circumspection that we tend to assume, but which so many others cannot perceive at present. To fail in this may cost us dearly as a nation.

This means that we need to look hard at the way the MCD is using its extraordinary resources, which for instance could more clearly be seen not just as for vocational or ministerial formation (lay or ordained), but as the basis for a form of "liberal" education, fostering critical thinking and knowledge of cultural traditions. There are many other potential students for us out there, who might undertake bachelor's degrees for such purposes, and who could through that experience become not only religiously, historically and culturally-literature persons, but trained in critical thinking in ways that could serve them well in many forms of employment and service.

So there are some things that could come to us, or be strengthened for us, in gaining university status. There are also some things that we need to consider that are distinctives of our own history aside from that status, and which we must protect and nurture.

The change of name does not change our polity; but the things it exposes us to almost inevitably will. We cannot go on acting as though we are, even in teaching MCD awards, independent entities linked by a quality assurance process, as we are sometimes tempted to do now. And we cannot, on the other hand, abandon the distinctive qualities of our constituent learning communities.

Some will be concerned about creeping centralization, reasonably enough. Is "recognition" (as in the current terminology of the MCD Act, which refers to "Recognized Teaching Institutions") enough to express the relationship between the parts and the whole, however? We need to find new language that affirms our distinctives as a "federated" university but which acknowledges a strong or even organic set of relationships between our learning communities.

The other striking thing we have amid this diverse higher education sector belies our rambling polity, namely a common cause or values base. While it is often hard to discern a deeper vision in particular universities or in Australian higher education generally than the training of foot soldiers in a battle (or the forced march) for greater economic prosperity, the MCD has a strong capacity to engage in conversation about justice, inclusion, faith and other goods which are both spiritual and social.

We thus have a unique opportunity to do one of the things a university should, but many find hard - to serve by asking persistent awkward and deep questions bout the nature of our society and its purposes. Our specifically Christian commitment is something we should treat as an asset, not just in itself but as the basis for an educational process which can be open to all, but takes ultimate questions seriously, and thus inspires and transforms lives, rather than merely offering training.

University status is not the answer, but a new and important question. It does not define who we are, but offers us a set of opportunities to contribute to the Church and to Australian society. I believe the MCD has the commitment, the resources, the history, and the hope, to do that well.

Australia's First Specialized University (of Divinity)

For some years the staff and Council of the Melbourne College of Divinity have been discussing the possibility of seeking University status. In Australia this has quite specific implications; the use of the title "University" is heavily regulated, and carries not only certain quality assurance regimes but the implication of a strong research capacity supporting its teaching and learning processes.

The MCD is one of Australia's older institutions of higher learning, founded in 1910 partly to complement The University of Melbourne, which had been constituted specifically so as to exclude degrees in theology. The colleges (including this one) of that University however were set up as religious foundations, partly to provide theological studies in the university precinct and community, without the problems of determining or examining adequate or orthodox religious knowledge.

The formation of the MCD as a degree-granting body took some time, but was led by local Church  and college leaders; the signature of Trinity's first Warden, Alexander Leeper, is on the deed creating the MCD. It was for the time a remarkable ecumenical endeavour, bringing together Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist and Congregational and other groups. The Roman Catholic Church, Churches of Christ, Salvation Army, Orthodox and Lutherans have all since been added to the MCD structure in teaching and/or governance terms.

In its first decades the MCD functioned, as did some Universities, primarily as an examining body rather than as a concrete community of scholars; it assumed the communities and work of the Melbourne University colleges and their theological schools, and subsequently of others too. Students could sit for the degrees of the MCD - primarily the graduate Bachelor of Divinity degree - without being part of any of these, however. All depended on a set of 3-hour examinations.

The major step towards being something more of a "real" than a virtual college took place in the 1970s when the MCD recognized some specific colleges and consortia as teaching a degree on the basis of continuous assessment (coursework) rather than exams. This Bachelor of Theology became and remains the mainstay of MCD teaching and learning, and is administered through recognized teaching institutions including the United Faculty of Theology, of which Trinity is a constituent.

When in the late 1980s a fairly diverse set of Australian higher education institutions were turned into universities, the MCD was in an anomalous position. Older than most even of the earlier universities, it was not one itself, at least as then understood. It was private (there are only two other private universities in Australia), and taught in only one field, but had an enviable reputation here and abroad. For some time then the MCD remained as a sort of high-quality anomaly, but has benefitted from research funding provided through the Australian Federal government (and performed at world standard, and well above many named "universities", according to the recent Excellence in Research for Australia exercise).

The idea of a "specialized University" was mooted in Federal policy some time ago but has never been acted on until now. The MCD leadership determined a few years ago to seek that status, which reflects its logical - and unique - place in Australian higher education. Today we learned of the recommendation from the state authority that oversaw a review of the application, which is positive. The Victorian Government Gazette dated today contains the following:

Education and Training Reform Act 2006
APPROVAL FOR THE MELBOURNE COLLEGE OF DIVINITY TO OPERATE AS A SPECIALISED UNIVERSITY

1. Authority 

This notice is issued pursuant to section 4.3.30(1) of the Education and Training Reform
Act 2006. 

2. Definitions
Melbourne College of Divinity means the Melbourne College of Divinity continued as a body corporate under the Melbourne College of Divinity Act 1910.
3.    Approval of institution to operate as a University
Pursuant to section 4.3.30(1) of the Education and Training Reform Act 2006, the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA) approves the Melbourne College of Divinity to operate as a specialised university under the specialised title of ‘MCD University of Divinity’.
4.    Period of approval
The approval herein remains in force for 5 years commencing on 1 January 2012.

The common seal of the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority was hereunto affixed on the 25th day of August 2011 as authorized by it pursuant to section 4.2.1(3) of the Education and Training Reform Act 2006.

The name 'MCD University of Divinity' will allow the existing reputation and recognition of the MCD to be carried forward into the new entity (although I suspect it will make explanations of the institution harder internationally), somewhat as the former Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (popularly known as RMIT) became 'RMIT University'.

 

This is an important step not only for the MCD community but for Australian higher education - Australia's first specialized university has (almost) arrived.

After the Perfect Storm: The Future of International Education in Australia

Does Australia's struggling engagement with international education have a future?

News media have reported widely on something of a "perfect storm" over the last year or so for institutions dependent on international enrolments, particularly from Asia. The combination of events has been problematic: reputational damage from racist incidents in the Australian community, exchange rate shifts making Australia a more expensive destination, increasing activity in marketing from the UK and the USA, and new restrictions on Australian visas for certain countries. Together these have made life tough for Australian colleges and universities.

Going deeper however, the news varies a great deal according to the kind of institution and the sort of courses students are seeking to undertake. New figures from Australian Education International show, unsurprisingly, that Indian students seeking VET courses fell most dramatically in 2010, by over 20%. Probably for a different set of reasons, English-language courses were similarly hit.

On the other hand, the number of international students enrolling in Australian university courses actually grew in 2010. Part of the difference has to do with time-frames; students often come to higher education through feeder programs, including English-language courses or Foundation Studies programs like that at Trinity. As a result their decisions are really made a year or more before their University enrolment, and the consequences of changes in preferences and patterns take longer to appear. Close to home for instance, Trinity had a particular good year for recruitment in 2010, and the University of Melbourne will thus have a good one in 2011. We expect 2011 to be solid but less spectacular, and similarly therefore the University might expect to have slightly lower demand from international students in 2012.

"Slightly" less demand and "solid" performance is indeed the order of the day for Australia's most desirable institutions and high-quality programs in higher education. Others do clearly have (even) greater challenges. Talk of "crises" and "crashes", however, results from clumsy aggregation of issues, as well as of statistics, in a sector whose diversity now makes it increasingly unhelpful to consider it as a single whole for most purposes. True, the net impact on the Australian economy of the downturns in VET and some other sectors is serious; but ironically the tendency to treat the sector as a coherent whole, and to make policy (e.g., over visa restrictions) as though it were so, has compounded the problems faced by some institutions.

Public policy and public discourse over higher education have long been mesmerized by the bumper crop of international students and their capacity to close funding gaps for public institutions and send cash into Australian communities. This undeniably important opportunity has been seized both creatively and clumsily, depending on where and what we are considering. The unedifying stories of fly-by-night providers exploiting students from India constitute an extreme case; but any institution, however venerable, that sees international students merely as an answer to a funding problem is not only acting dubiously relative to its own mission and values, but riding for a fall with regard to that very part of their activity.

Students from Asia have been attracted to Australian institutions because of the quality of our offerings and the reasonable cost of obtaining them (we should admit that the attraction of permanent residence is often potent as well, but that's another story). The survivors, in VET and higher education and elsewhere, from the "perfect storm" will be those best able to demonstrate that quality and value, and necessarily therefore a deeper sense of their own educational mission and identity.

Without a bigger picture - a sense of how our contribution to these students' education connects with the mission of a university and its role in contributing to a global public good - we risk not only failing the moral challenge of a shrinking world, but undermining the quality proposition of the original offering.

If we have passed the "high water mark" of the recent rich tide of enrolments, as it has been suggested, all the more reason to ensure now that we have firm ground to stand on, and make sure we have a high-quality future to offer both Australian and international students.

What Makes a University Great?

In the Melbourne Age recently a number of Australian Vice-Chancellors (University Presidents, for international readers) were asked what might make a University great.

There were some astute observations - these are intelligent people, after all. There were, however, some clangers. Most obvious was the statement attributed to Ian Young, head of Swinburne University and shortly to succeed to leadership at the Australian National University in Canberra.

...if you ask people on the street to name great universities, they would roll off names such as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard.

''It is undoubtedly because of their research performance,'' he says.

I could hardly disagree more, at least with the reasons given. People on the street are aware of these places because of their enormous contribution to education: to the formation of thinkers, scientists, artists and leaders. Some of these institutions have come only fairly recently to what is usually thought of as "research" in Australian higher education policy.

Throw-away lines are not the basis on which any of us would want to be judged, but I will at least take this as a sort of Freudian slip for the sector as a whole. Australian higher education, or at least its bureaucratic superstructure, has convinced itself that research is its real reason for existence, and in the process has imagined itself a past in which this was always the case (another sign that we need more resources for the study of history!).

Students, however, want education, and so they should. They come hoping to be trained, but also inspired; they come seeking opportunities for fulfilment of goals and dreams, but also still forming them.

Research is not the enemy of this function; there is nothing more inspiring than being taught by scholars of great erudition or scientists who have made great discoveries. This research-teaching nexus has been adopted as the model for Australian universities by our policy-makers and funders, and it is admirable.

There are two problems with it, however, at least in the current form. One is that it is imagined as the only real model. Here as so often the imposition of uniformity has become a proxy for, and indeed the enemy of, real excellence. Australia does not seem ready to sustain liberal arts colleges along the US model, but no state university has been given the means to become or create one. We may hope that fuller implementation of the Bradley Review of Higher Education, which envisages funding following students according to their institutional choices, rather than allocating it to Universities along "command economy" lines, will be a positive influence.

This could mean that students gravitate to institutions which offer quality based on current educational programs and outcomes, not merely those that trade on past glories or present research. It will be interesting to see whether, in time, the offering of degree-level education by historically-VET-sector providers, and by private players such as religiously-based colleges, may threaten the complacency of the larger institutions.

The second problem - not an easy one - is how to make the research-teaching nexus work. The same Age article gave examples of how students can be inspired to become researchers, but that's not really the point. They need to be inspired to become leaders and thinkers in whatever field, not just to supply the succession plan of a research culture. Most university teachers are conscientious, as well as intelligent; but many are encouraged to regard teaching as a necessary evil. There are no all-staff congratulatory e-mails related to teaching that compare to the hushed silence awaiting a new round of ARC grants that offer the chance not to teach. While the AQF battles the demons of minimum standards through the anachronism of uniformity (again!), the pursuit of excellence in teaching is not given the same emphasis or the same resources.

A great university would, I suspect, have great research and great teaching going on. This probably won't get much disagreement. We do have moments of such greatness in many of our universities. What remains deeply and sadly unclear is whether and how policies and funding priorities are fostering that much-valued combination, or merely hoping that the teaching benefit will emerge through benign neglect. Whether we should be seeking our own Oxford or Harvard remains to be seen - but under current circumstances, the horizon may well remain bare.

The Crisis We Had to Have: The International Education 'Sector' Pauses for Reflection

According to some, Australia's international education sector is in crisis. Exchange-rate shifts, concerns about violence, newly-enthusiastic competitors in the US and the UK, and changes to visa requirements for international students have conspired to make enrolment numbers stagnant, and many institutions nervous.

Under these circumstances, the prominence in Australia's public conversation of the international education "sector" is worth examining more closely and critically. The "sector" may be a useful category for accumulating statistics about total revenue and economic impact, but less helpful for understanding the programs and institutions, the students and staff who participate in them, or the specific challenges they face.

More specifically, generic sector-level discourse about international education tends to be driven by the commonality of financial scale, rather than the more elusive but more fundamental issues of inherent quality and value, which are more varied. Revenue is what they have in common - but that tends to hide rather than reveal what must now be given attention.

Policy and strategy constructed purely on the commonality that international students pay fees dislocates the necessary place of education itself as the foundation of strategic vision for colleges and universities. It objectifies students as 'clients', countries as 'markets', colleges as 'providers', and makes education itself as inspiring as making widgets.

If any more engaging vision is obscured by such language and by anxiety about revenue, should we then wonder why Australia seems vulnerable to perceptions of racism, or that we struggle to persuade some prospective students that we are offering an experience of the highest quality?

The great opportunity offered by the current crisis might be for reflection. If business as usual is not possible in some places, it's time to ask what the business is, and what it is for.

The most valuable thing would be for the balance to swing to the specifics of education itself. This will involve above all an openness to diverse strategies, whose commonality is based on the pursuit of the high quality. Quality, varied as it necessarily is, is the real common selling-point of Australian education for genuine international students.

Pursuit of quality needs to be supported by a policy and regulatory framework flexible enough to allow such diverse strategies for quality to emerge and flourish, and not merely by attempts to make institutions mark to a common bottom-line.

The irony of a public conversation and policy framework which start with the money is that they are less likely to achieve or sustain financial results. A shift of focus regarding international education, from generic revenue goals to the more varied ones of education excellence, is required for Australian educational institutions to assure their inherent quality, and hence to be capable of contributing economically as well.

The Taxi Driver's Guide to International Education

[From an address given at the Dean's Dinner in the Hall of Trinity College, April 24 2010]

If you go to Washington or Canberra, cab drivers are reknowned as pundits and sources of political rumour. In New York, a taxi may be a source of informal reviews of Broadway shows or restaurants. In Melbourne however taxi drivers are a rich source of information about quite different things: cricket, Hindi and Urdu popular culture, Indian restaurants, and international education.

As both locals and visitors may have realized, a large number of Melbourne cab drivers are current or former students, very often from India. They are in my experience a rich source of anecdotal information about local Universities and technical education providers, especially about courses in IT, hospitality and business. They are impressively well-informed and educated people, who have taken on one of the least well-paid or supported positions in local service industry, for the sake of their goal of making Australia a home for themselves and their families.

There were 516,000 international students in Australia in June 2008.  Around 33% of Victoria’s post–secondary students are from overseas.  Although many of these are in the vocational sector, The University of Melbourne’s international enrolment – just under 25% of about 45,000 students – is not the highest among the Group of 8 universities.

The fact that Australia has a significant number of international students is, in the first instance, to be celebrated. It suggests Australian higher education is well-recognized internationally, it provides means for building networks of cooperation in both formal and informal ways, and is of course important to the economy.

Yet the numbers are widely, if not very publicly, acknowledged as problematic. These very large absolute and relative international enrolments in Australian universities are typically driven not by desire for partnerships in development, or even by strategic concerns about Australia’s place in the Asian economy. The numbers in some cases defy even commercial logic; they expose the institutions concerned to huge risks if events such as another SARS or regional economic crisis were to emerge.

There are few Australian higher education institutions that really have a strategy around internationalization that goes much deeper than the revenue international students bring. This myopia has of course been catalysed by the problems of funding higher education; because a University typically loses money on domestic undergraduate enrolments, there is a very deep institutional temptation to set targets for international (and full-fee paying) enrolments that balance the ledger. In a sense, the Universities have had little choice.

During last year’s debate about the safety of international and particularly Indian students, the importance of that economic impact was never hard to see. It was as easy to find articles in the press by searching “$16 billion industry” as by searching for tags more clearly related to higher education or violence against students.

The conversation in the press thus tended unwittingly to reflect a problem, as much as consciously to analyze it. A public conversation about the safety of international students that presented their value and contribution solely in dollar terms reflected an objectification not much more edifying than that exemplified in the tragic and violent events that provoked the whole conversation.

What should we do? The fact of a substantial international enrolment in this and other Universities is a positive thing. These students will play a part in helping Australians understand other countries and cultures, and will take with them, if they return, a deepened sense of Australian culture. All this we may hope will lead to better international relations and partnerships of various kinds.

Yet we should also hope for new funding models in higher education that allow and indeed challenge Universities to take internationalization seriously as an ethical and educational issue, not merely a financial one. Australia’s strong education and research tradition can assist the promotion not only of prosperity, but of civil society itself, in the region. It can also assist Australia to position itself more adequately for coming changes; not only and most obviously the economic power of emerging powers in the region, but even the growth of their respective higher education sectors, which will eventually meet the demand currently driving many students from places like China to Australia.

Australia should also be glad of many of those who will stay, rather than return, such the Indian students undertaking vocational programs. Yet the connections between residence and such programs have been profoundly flawed and need to be reconstructed. Some of the current detours, via taxi ranks and programs students have little real interest in or need for, must give way to programs that international students with ambitions to migrate really want, and Australia really needs.

International Students: More than Money

Stories about recent violence against Indian students in Melbourne and the international response have emphasized the importance of international education to Australia in purely quantitative, dollar-based terms; the phrase "$15 billion dollar international education industry" seemed to be pasted formulaically into every article. None asked whether there was a value to Australia, or to international students, beyond that calculation.

Unwittingly, the press as well as the political leaders who are properly concerned about the situation, doubtless benign in and of themselves, are revealing but not addressing the fundamental cause of the problem.

In the last analysis, there is not such a great difference between opportunistic acts of petty crime in the outer suburbs which target international students, and opportunistic educational policies and practices which target international students. In the last analysis, a government which will not grant international students concessional public transport fares has only shaky ground to stand on when it condemns attacks on those who ride trains and buses late at night. Each objectifies the students concerned, and each involves a short-sighted desire for immediate gain whose ramifications for all involved have scarcely been thought through. When you reduce the talent, the needs and the aspirations of thousands of young people to an industry that generates a certain number of dollars, you treat the individuals involved as less than who and what they are.

Australia is justly proud of its institutions of higher learning, some of which are of world class, and others of which at least do well in providing skills and generating ideas which can serve the greater good, here and further afield. International students have an acknowledged place in them, given Australia's developed institutions and strong traditions of academic quality, which may be hard for many to access, in the developing world particularly. There is no need to be coy about the fact that this engagement has economic benefits for Australia, as well as for students' home countries, when they are able to return and maketheir various contributions with new skills.

Yet the basis for any educational enterprise must be more than economic; or rather the "economics" of education have to be more wholistic, concerned with how the production and distribution of resources can be carried out so as to serve the common good, as all economics should be. The economics of anything by this definition concern the fundamental well-being of all the participants. This recognition is necessary even for the financial definitions of success to be met; a "$15 billion dollar international student industry" is no draw-card; only a desire for excellence, and a vision that education can transform lives, can undergird a sustainable
education sector.

Violence is not the only cause for concern for international students. Can we sustain the institutions and the educational experience we offer, when selling them seems to be the only public concern? Will we convince anyone that the security of individuals matters to us when we are obviously looking harder at "metrics" to do with Australian advantage rather than real people or the needs of developing countries?

While critical attention is fortuitously being given to some of the "bottom feeder" private teaching bodies of the shopfront kind at present, the problem is not just a lack of "quality assurance". When Australia's universities are themselves under-funded and enrol international students based on balance-sheet needs rather than any broader strategy of international partnership and engagement, a whole branch of education policy is revealed as bankrupt. At the high end of the quality spectrum as well as the low, we risk objectifying students and jeopardizing the very thing that makes Australian education attractive: a quality that arises from commitment and from values deeper than those of balance-sheets.

The world we inhabit is not a set of closed systems, but a deeply-interdependent network of communities. Australia is a relatively small player in this small world, but it has privileges and resourcesthat bring great responsibility and some hope of a positive role in a very different future. A country that could speak of that responsibility, and of the need for international partnership and understanding as a basic element of education policy, would have a better chance of being a country that could show partnership and understanding to individual Indian students, present and future, too.

Countering Cash Cows: Rethinking How Australian Higher Education Views International Students

Update: A version of this piece was published today (12 March 08) in The Australian.

International students’ interests are not at the forefront of current debates about Higher Education funding in Australia. Their access to Australian Universities will not change radically with the implementation of new policies that abolish full-fee domestic places – as before, students from overseas will be fee-payers. But the changes promised by the Rudd Government, aimed to benefit domestic students, entrench some unhappy assumptions about those from elsewhere.

Over the last few decades, Australian Universities have built up a remarkable and problematic dependence on income derived from overseas students, often receiving more revenue from their tuition fees than from Commonwealth Grants. The capacity of such students to offer this revenue stream risks being the sole determiner of their value to the Australian system, student numbers being determined not by policy factors relating to educational experiences or outcomes, so much as the ‘bottom line’ or other practical limits.

Educational leaders and policy makers are certainly sensitive to this issue. In an important speech at the Melbourne Press Club last week, Monash University Vice-Chancellor Richard Larkins – also an alumnus and Fellow of Trinity – made some telling points about the challenges facing the sector, including the place of international students. He noted, for instance, the inhospitable message created by something as concrete and small-minded as the lack of public transport concessions to students from overseas.

Professor Larkins also called for the deregulation of the Student Contribution Amount for HECS, which would allow Universities themselves to set fees they deemed appropriate and viable. This is a complicated issue, but I would add one further reason it should be taken very seriously.

There is a sort of structural temptation to treat Australia’s international engagement, particularly for undergraduate education, as primarily financial. The inability of Australian Universities to charge fees beyond current HECS levels leaves international students easy targets for cash-strapped and short-sighted University managers and planners. Their renewed status as the sole group of full-fee payers, as well as the established reliance on international students in the sector, may be deeply subversive of attempts to set enrolment targets based on any other factor. Such an approach is ultimately self-defeating because it is not driven by the desire for excellence that is necessary for the success of the institutions, and risks undermining the quality of what is being offered to those on whose enthusiasm the system depends.

Although Australia in general is well-regarded by international students who come here, this positive view is no cause for complacency when an increasingly competitive future looms. Recent research suggests that the specific institution, rather than a national system, will be the key to attracting quality students in future (Campus Review 19.02.08, pp. 1, 5). Australian Universities need to base their international strategies first on maintaining and developing quality, and by doing so address specific concerns such as pedagogy and student experience. They also need to be able to think about goals that recall and go beyond the Colombo Plan of the mid-twentieth century, reclaiming the place of education as a basis for international relations and social development.

We risk relying on the flawed assumption that the relationship between international enrolments and quality of educational experience runs largely in one direction, and that so long as the funding holds out all students will benefit. This is just one symptom of a broader flaw in discourse about Australian Higher Education, the one which imagines curriculum alone as a guarantee of desired University outcomes. If that were true, it would matter little to the quality of education just who participated, or where. In fact we know that students benefit as much from the social, cultural and aesthetic environment in which their experience takes place as from other factors – one element of which is just who does participate.

For international students’ sake but for Australians’ too, we need to have aims for international engagement based on considerations of quality such as pedagogy and student experience. Trinity itself runs what is recognized as a leading Foundation Studies (TCFS) program in close association with the University of Melbourne. We are benefiting from strong enrolments at present, but believe we have achieved them by maintaining and promoting quality of teaching and learning for their own sake. Since our program is specifically for international students, we don’t have the option of admitting Australians and anticipating the more diverse student experience at the University, but we know that we benefit pedagogically – not just financially - from having students from as many as 25 foreign countries. Their diversity is a huge advantage, as well as a challenge, to teachers and to the students themselves. The University also benefits from the presence of a group of students whose rich experience with us has proven to be a successful preparation for what comes after.

Australian Universities need to ask now just what forms of educational engagement with a global reality will make them better places to teach, learn and research. The second question, not the first, is how all this relates to the ‘bottom line’. Of course the capacity to ask such questions itself depends on financial viability, and there is the rub. But one thing is clear – selling education internationally without regard to the impact of the sale on the product itself is unsustainable. If Australian Universities want to offer anything to our neighbours in decades to come, we must pay more attention not just to what we are offering now, but to whom we offer it also. That must mean giving our Universities the scope to consider international students as enriching our campuses for pedagogical purposes, and not merely for economic ones.