International students have emerged, yet again, as the punching bag distracting from systemic problems homegrown here in Australia.
Australia’s Education Minister Jason Clare and then Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil have put international students in the crosshairs, with caps on student numbers, the doubling of non-refundable application fees, and measures stopping tourists from switching to student visas.
In the field of housing policy, Ben Eltham has rightly noted the “current shortage of affordable housing took a generation to develop and has many contributing factors”, including conservative tax reform, and public housing policy.
Commodified education is no different.
National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) leaders told The Guardian the pursuit of international student fees was fuelling a “culture of revenue, profit and competition”.
But Australia’s tertiary education woes do not originate from foreign students, but from economic rationalism, decades of decay, underfunding and poor management.
It is not just that public funding for tertiary education was down to 0.65% of GDP by 2018 from 1.5% fifty years ago.
The introduction of corporate management structures, which sees an inflated class of highly paid bureaucrats, increasingly distant from staff and students on the ground, predates the supercharging of international education, which doubled from 2001 to 2020.
Management practices are key to the commodification of tertiary education — for all students and staff.
Sydney University, one of the “sandstones”, shows what teaching intensification looks like. Since 2001, when the department changed its measurements of student numbers, student load has increased by 96%, while equivalent teaching hours are up just 21%. Figure 1 shows that the amount of students has increased from 31 to 50 students per teaching hour in the latest available figures.
Over these years almost half of this teaching (44%) has been performed by casual academics. While complaints rage about university laxity on the use of artificial intelligence, casual tutors such as myself receive zero hours’ pay for plagiarism work (academic honesty) and zero hours’ pay for student consultations.
For all the focus on international students, giving teachers the class time and small class sizes that would make it possible to spend time supporting all our students has barely rated a mention.
International students aren’t to blame for the falling standards in our classrooms. Anyone teaching in higher education knows that domestic students, as well as international ones, are struggling. Pandemic lockdowns hit the hardest for high schoolers who are now coming through university, with significant drops in literacy and numeracy recorded across the world after disruptions to face-to-face teaching.
Pitiful raises to Youth Allowance haven’t scratched the surface of poverty for students living on $639 a fortnight. The sky-rising cost of living means working-class students are increasingly forced to work alongside their studies, with 74% of bachelor’s degree students working part- or full-time in May 2023, up 15% over 10 years (Figure 2).
Students have less time to spend on their studies, while teachers are spread thin with less time to deliver education to more students.
With tutors like myself racing through marking at 4,500 words an hour and arts degrees set to tip over $50,000, it is no wonder some students perceive their degree as a commodity. It is this more than anything that feeds a gamified approach to education and sub-par essays, whether written by artificial intelligence or not.
The processes squeezing students and staff are precisely those feeding the eye-watering salaries of Australian university vice-chancellors, the bloated operating margins across the country and, to return to the scapegoating of migrants for housing supply, the university sector’s multi-billion dollar real estate portfolio.
In all the talk of international student fees, for and against, any internationalist vision where it is conceivable Australian, Chinese, Indian and other overseas students might mutually gain from studying alongside one another in an increasingly chaotic, polarised and geopolitically charged world, is lost entirely.
Cutting international student numbers or jacking up their application fees will not do anything for the students and staff stuck between management policy and government underfunding.
Nothing short of an overhaul of tertiary education governance, restoring public funding and paying students a living wage, can hope to make education and research the goal, rather than a coincidental byproduct, of Australian universities.
As long as the focus remains on international student policy, no matter how many layers of sympathy for the students or anger at the executives are applied, the realities of commodified education will remain untouched.
Disclosure: Sophie Cotton is a member of the National Tertiary Education Union and an NTEU branch committee member at the University of Sydney.
