Australia’s universities hit by loss of ‘cash cow’ foreign students, as coronavirus vaccine race heats up

Foreign students make up over a quarter of enrolments in Australia, not only providing cash to fund research, but also carrying some of it out

But the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that only a handful of international students have made it to Australia, exacerbating a research funding crisis

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A researcher works at a University of Queensland (UQ) laboratory, as part of an effort to develop a potential Covid-19 vaccine. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 4:01pm, 18 Sep 2020Updated: 8:42pm, 25 Nov 2020

Leading a team of scientists at the University of Queensland in what has been framed as Australia’s best shot at a Covid-19 vaccine, Paul Young has plenty to worry about: from competition with other vaccine hopefuls to unexpected clinical results that could derail everything.

But there is another concern that has little to do with science and all to do with economics – a research funding crisis years in the making that has been exacerbated by the very pandemic Young is trying to stop. With the government scaling back investment in research, universities have come to rely on a flow of international students that have now been frozen out of the country to stem the virus’s spread.

“Universities get accused of going down that path and looking for additional revenue,” said Young of the high numbers of international students across the nation’s university campuses. “Well, we’ve had to go down that path because our revenue from government funding sources has diminished.”

Foreign students make up over a quarter of enrolments in Australia – more than four times the OECD average. That has made education the country’s fourth largest export, behind only iron ore, coal and natural gas. Yet only a handful of students managed to make it into the country to begin or resume their studies amid the pandemic. There were nearly 40 international visa arrivals in July, a decline of 143,810 compared with the same month in 2019.

Australia’s education sector generated fee exports of A$13.7 billion (US$10 billion) in 2018-19, trade data shows. But “student fees are less than half the story”, said James McIntyre, Bloomberg Economist in Sydney.