Australia’s future as a leading higher education provider is under threat by fierce international competition as a Senate inquiry recommends “turning the blowtorch” on dodgy education providers.
A 200-page interim report, released on Thursday, has urged the tertiary sector to focus on quality and integrity to ensure sustainable international student growth within Australia.
Labor MP and committee member, Julian Hill, said the sector needed reform in key areas, such as better regulation of private vocational education training providers, in order to avoid falling behind.
“We need to prune the tree to save the tree and let it grow,” he said.
The report pointed to a number of factors that it said was “changing the shape of international education”.
“Fierce global competition, changes in source countries’ economies, rising costs of living, negative student experience and poor graduate work outcomes continue to be significant factors impacting on future students’ choice of study destination.”
One of the report’s key recommendations is a five-year national plan, titled Team Australia, to build a stronger international education brand and a market diversification plan.
The plan, if accepted, would see a stronger drive to attract students from sub-Saharan Africa, south-east Asia and South and Central America and a more integrated look at the country’s migration and education settings to attract the “best and brightest”.
But the report makes a number of tough recommendations to “prune the tree” and address the “persistent and deep-seated” integrity issues within the vocational education and training sector.
“Put simply, sustainable growth means Australia must more deliberately pursue ‘quality over quantity’”, the report said.
“This may mean tough decisions to cut back on lower-quality students, especially in the lower end of the private VET market, and focus on market development and recruitment of high-quality students.”
The recommendations include a 12-month pause by the vocational training regulator Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) to accredit new overseas student education providers, and to require providers who seek to offer courses to international students to already have operated and delivered to domestic students for at least 12 months.
It also recommended a boost to ASQA’s compliance and enforcement resources to ensure stronger oversight.
Hill said these “bold suggestions” were necessary to put a “blowtorch” on “dodgy” education providers and agents.
“There are serious questions over the sustainable trajectory of growth in student numbers [and] the quality and integrity of providers, especially at the bottom end of the private market,” he told Guardian Australia.
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“There’s amber alert lights flashing that cannot be ignored.”
The Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia, the peak body representing independent providers, agreed the reputation for quality that Australia’s international education sector has is important.
However, the body’s CEO, Troy Williams, said the report’s recommendations would be the “death knell” for the sector and should not be accepted.
“From time to time, governments consign to the waste-bin of history some of the more unsound recommendations that parliamentary committees make. There are several in this report that should meet this fate,” Williams said.
The theme of “quality over quantity” was also extended to the university sector, where the committee noted universities had become reliant on international student fees to fund research and private investment portfolios.
The committee called for the federal government, through the university accord, to work to ensure the university sector is less captive to “outside market forces” and “an over-reliance on international student revenue”.
It urged the commonwealth to work with states and territories to “overcome currently fragmented, duplicative and internally competitive approaches to market” to attract international student interest.