More on Overseas Students and the Australian University. (September
10, 2007)
"The name of the university is now tarnished ... It is inevitable that a bad business decision will affect the reputation of the university as a whole ... If there is negative coverage it affects every single student that will eventually receive the certificate from UNSW. And it will affect poor me as well, having to endure the taunts even on the flight back to Singapore."
Harriet Alexander and Gerard Noonan writing in The Sydney Morning Herald attribute the quote to a blog by a Singaporean student attending the University of New South Wales' Kensington campus. He was commenting on the the decision of the UNSW to pull the plug on its joint venture for an Asian campus in Singapore.
And just last week Monash vice-chancellor, Richard Larkins, was spruiking the necessity of Australian universities setting up offshore even while a debate continues in the UK as to the efficacy of doing so.
In 2006 overseas fees collected from overseas students contributed some 15% of university total income.What isn't revealed by the figures, however, is what is the real cost-benefit to Australia. A case can be made that the cost to the nation's long term commonweal outweighs the additional income gained by the universities in the short term because the "market forces" subvert the universities' learning and research infrastructure. Not only is the nation's future competence in mathematics, engineering and the sciences being sacrificed, as well as the education of prospective secondary school teachers, the humanities are being increasingly downgraded.
So for example on anecdotal evidence the classics are better represented at Sydney Grammar than at The University of Sydney.
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