The Skills Crisis, the Overseas Student Industry and University Culpability By James Reed

Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy, academics of the Australian Population Research Institute, released a research report in December 2022, entitled “The Skills Crisis, University Culpability and the Overseas Student Industry.” The paper is a real breath of fresh air as it is critical of the international student industry, which dominates the Australian universities, and is nothing more than a wing of Big Australia. As I read the paper, although Birrell and Healy do not use the term, it is the Great Replacement of local students by foreigners.

https://tapri.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/TAPRI-SKILLS-CRISIS-FINAL-DEC-2022.pdf

The paper gives a detailed argument that this replacement is occurring. There is only a limited number of undergraduate places funded by the Federal government, and the universities have been given the liberty of deciding how to fill the remaining places, which they do through international students, who pay much more, being charged what the market can bear. And none of this benefits the nation building capacities of Australia. As they argue:

“Few, other than insiders, know how much of Australia’s university teaching resources is devoted to overseas students. It is enormous. In 2020, 40 per cent of all university-level award completions went to overseas students (up from 35 per cent in 2012). 2 THE SKILLS CRISIS, UNIVERSITY CULPABILITY AND THE OVERSEAS STUDENT INDUSTRY Most of the overseas student graduates are in fields with no relevance to Australia’s urgent skill needs. Nearly half are in Management and Commerce (Table 1), despite there being no domestic shortage of such graduates. By 2020, 63 per cent of all graduates (both domestic and overseas) in this field were overseas students. But that’s not all. Few observers seem to know or care that in some of the fields of study where skill shortages are chronic, the universities are prioritizing training of overseas students over domestic students. This is the case for both IT and engineering, where there are far more overseas than domestic graduates (Table 1). Nursing is trending in this direction too. Moreover, the overseas students do not have to meet the high academic standards and language skills required of the domestic students vying for these places. This is a moral issue. Where is the outcry about the obvious unfairness and the lack of university accountability on the issue?”

Of course, there is no outcry because the system has institutionalised anti-racist rhetoric, so the system becomes beyond criticism in this insane woke environment. Clearly this is an excellent reason for major reform of the universities, and the ideology of Big Australia. Many of us have been battling this issue for decades, some since the 1970s and 1980s. It is a hard road to hoe.