The View | Despite grim China-Australia relations, the student housing sector Down Under looks bright

Name: Welcome back! Australia reopens its borders to fully vaccinated travellers after two years
Uploaded: 2022-03-15T01:15:18.000Z
Duration: 2 min 48 s
Description: Welcome back! Australia reopens its borders to fully vaccinated travellers after two years

Australia’s international education sector has taken a hit from both the pandemic and a deterioration in Canberra’s relations with Beijing, but enrolments from China have proved resilient

This bodes well for student housing as a real estate investment category, although finding high-quality assets remains challenging

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International students from China get ready to take pictures in their graduation gowns on the University of Sydney campus, after their in-person graduation ceremony was cancelled during the coronavirus outbreak, in Sydney, Australia, on July 4, 2020. Photo: Reuters

Nicholas Spiro

Published: 9:15am, 15 Mar 2022

Spare a thought for Australia’s pandemic-battered universities, which rely more heavily on revenues from international students than their peers in other English-speaking countries.

Before the virus struck, more than 40 per cent of the sector’s funding came from overseas students. At the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne, two of the nation’s most prestigious institutions, foreign students accounted for nearly 60 per cent of revenues, data from Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute shows.

When Australia slammed its borders shut to non-residents in March 2020, universities’ dependence on funding from overseas students turned into one of the economy’s biggest vulnerabilities. A US$29 billion market in 2019, and the nation’s most valuable services export, Australia’s international education sector was plunged into crisis.

Some Australian politicians claimed the sector only had itself to blame, having leaned too heavily on foreign students, particularly Chinese students, by far the biggest source of overseas enrolments. Amid the worst breakdown in relations between Canberra and Beijing in a generation, the nearly 40 per cent share of Chinese students in international enrolments came under sharp scrutiny.

Yet, two years on from the start of the pandemic, it is enrolments from China that have proved the most resilient. When the government announced last November that fully vaccinated foreign students would be allowed to return to Australia from December 1 without travel exemptions, Education Minister Alan Tudge noted that overall enrolments from China were down just 7.5 per cent since 2019, compared with an average of 17 per cent.

02:48

Welcome back! Australia reopens its borders to fully vaccinated travellers after two years

This is a key factor underpinning demand for purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) in Australia, a nascent segment of the country’s property industry compared to the more mature markets in America and Britain. Despite being the world’s third-largest recipient of international tertiary students, Australia remains woefully undersupplied in terms of high-quality, professionally managed student housing.

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.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}The View | Despite grim China-Australia relations, the student housing sector Down Under looks bright

The View | Despite grim China-Australia relations, the student housing sector Down Under looks bright