Australia’s education industry facing US$15 billion loss as frustrated, worried students ponder futures
- Australia’s international education sector was worth around A$40 billion (US$29 billion) in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic
- But students, the majority who come from China, are considering their options as Australia’s borders remained closed
Frustrated by being “taught by robots”, worried by a rising threat of racism and exposure to the Delta variant, overseas students most which originally hail from China, are weighing up their options, raising question marks over the future of Australia’s under- pressure international education sector.
And that value is set to fall by half to A$20 billion by the end of next year as Australia’s worst coronavirus outbreak poses new threats to the return of foreign students, including displaced Chinese students temporarily studying online and new ones looking to start school, according to an analysis by the Mitchell Institute at the University of Victoria in Melbourne.
For Chinese students it is a perfect storm of problems as they start to lose patience and look to study elsewhere.
“To be honest it just [feels like] robots teaching me, we can just read the textbooks from whatever page and then we will finish our degree,” said University of Sydney student Catherina Lee, a native of Changsha, the capital city of the southern Hunan province.
“Most of my friends don‘t want to go back to Australia, because firstly, the Covid-19 situation is more severe there, and people don’t wear masks, and wouldn’t get vaccinated. So everybody was kind of frightened by that.”