Just read this article in The Pie News - Aus: int'l students contribute most tuition fees, fears of over-reliance - which opens with the assertion that international students "account for almost 72% of total tuition gains at public universities" based on an interpretation of a paper recently published by Andrew Norton and Ittima Cherastidtham at the Grattan Institute in Melbourne.
The paper University fees: what students pay in deregulated markets deals with revenue from full fee-paying students at Australian universities, consisting almost exclusively of international students and domestic postgraduate coursework students. Commonwealth supported places, which provide the bulk of tuition revenue to universities either via direct government funding or student contributions, are not mentioned in the paper as they are not relevant to the discussion. Norton and Cherastidtham have some interesting things to say about tuition fees, including the propensity of both international and domestic students to opt for expensive courses at well-ranked institutions, providing evidence to support that old international education truism that price is a proxy for quality. But they are not concerned with other forms of funding, at least not in this study.
The Pie News article is potentially confusing because it focuses on international student revenue as a portion of tuition paid by full fee-paying students only, not as a portion of total revenue, and suggests this is some form of over-reliance. There's no doubt international student tuition fees are important, but they account for about 18% of total revenue at universities in Australia, so the 72% figure is misleading. Fees from domestic postgraduate students account for about 7% of total revenue. In a primarily public Higher Education system it is hardly surprising that there are these two cohorts of privately funded students and virtually no others - the Pie News article however gives the impression that the overwhelming majority of tuition revenue at Australian universities comes from international students, which is not the case.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about whether or not 18% of revenue constitutes over-reliance, particularly when that system-wide 18% includes universities with up to 30% of total revenue derived from international students. But it's not helpful to take the discussion out of context and bandy about figures like 72%. The Grattan Institute paper flags future work on "how universities spend income from deregulated markets (and the) implications for Australian higher education policy." That's something to look forward to, but let's try to get the reporting right when the time comes.
The paper University fees: what students pay in deregulated markets deals with revenue from full fee-paying students at Australian universities, consisting almost exclusively of international students and domestic postgraduate coursework students. Commonwealth supported places, which provide the bulk of tuition revenue to universities either via direct government funding or student contributions, are not mentioned in the paper as they are not relevant to the discussion. Norton and Cherastidtham have some interesting things to say about tuition fees, including the propensity of both international and domestic students to opt for expensive courses at well-ranked institutions, providing evidence to support that old international education truism that price is a proxy for quality. But they are not concerned with other forms of funding, at least not in this study.
The Pie News article is potentially confusing because it focuses on international student revenue as a portion of tuition paid by full fee-paying students only, not as a portion of total revenue, and suggests this is some form of over-reliance. There's no doubt international student tuition fees are important, but they account for about 18% of total revenue at universities in Australia, so the 72% figure is misleading. Fees from domestic postgraduate students account for about 7% of total revenue. In a primarily public Higher Education system it is hardly surprising that there are these two cohorts of privately funded students and virtually no others - the Pie News article however gives the impression that the overwhelming majority of tuition revenue at Australian universities comes from international students, which is not the case.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about whether or not 18% of revenue constitutes over-reliance, particularly when that system-wide 18% includes universities with up to 30% of total revenue derived from international students. But it's not helpful to take the discussion out of context and bandy about figures like 72%. The Grattan Institute paper flags future work on "how universities spend income from deregulated markets (and the) implications for Australian higher education policy." That's something to look forward to, but let's try to get the reporting right when the time comes.
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