Coronavirus: universities contend with their dependence on Chinese students
- One in six international students hail from China, spending an estimated US$30 billion a year on overseas tuition alone
- Crisis offers world’s second largest economy a chance to promote own schools, as online lectures and life in lockdown take lustre off foreign degree experience
When the coronavirus outbreak triggered travel bans during the Lunar New Year holiday, about 100,000 Chinese students were stranded at home and unable to return to Australia. Li Siqi, a 23-year-old Master of Science student from Guangdong province, was one of them.
“The first thing I felt was really panicked,” said Li, who had to spend two weeks in Malaysia before authorities would let her into Australia. She is now living in lockdown and trying to study online after the University of Melbourne switched to a virtual campus.
The outbreak has jolted universities worldwide, upending a multibillion-dollar international student market that underpins the finances of many leading institutions.
With about one in six international students hailing from China, the upheaval has highlighted the risks of over-relying on the world’s second-largest economy – an issue the education industry will have to confront once it emerges from the crisis.
Few establishments understand this better than the University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest, where Chinese made up 24 per cent of the total student population last year.