Foreign student fees ‘can’t sustain research costs’

Australia’s eight research-intensive universities say they can’t go on relying on the fees paid by foreign students to fund their research programmes, writes Tim Dodd for The Australian.

The heavy reliance of universities on foreign students, who paid nearly AU$8 billion (US$5.5 billion) in tuition fees last year, is a major issue in higher education that has been little mentioned in this election campaign. Yet the issue causes disquiet in universities, which are aware that the large Chinese student market, which delivers nearly four in 10 of the international students in Australian universities, is softening.

The Group of Eight universities, which do the majority of university research, say they are dependent on international student revenue to fund their research programmes. “We cannot sustain a funding model which relies on foreign students to subsidise research, and that’s the crux of the issue,” said Group of Eight Chief Executive Vicki Thomson. “It’s not international education that’s an issue – it’s the fact that government has walked away from funding our universities and we now operate under a perverse and distorted funding model.”
Full report on The Australian site