Exchange rate blues

Australia can’t make the most of what Europe has to offer until its exchange rate goes ***up***, writes John Ross. If you were to express a preferred origin for your overseas students – which, of course, you wouldn’t – it would be hard to go past Europe. Most of the problems associated with international students in Australia don’t apply to Europe. The safety concerns which trashed Australian education’s reputation in India, for example, simply haven’t registered there. European students don’t seem to experience the sense of alienation common among other groups – particularly the Chinese and Indians, who find themselves studying alongside so many of their compatriots that they struggle to make local friends. And Europeans – particularly western Europeans – tend to favour the high-level study now prioritised by Australian policy-makers. Visiting students from north-western Europe and Scandinavia enrolled in higher education more than twice as much as VET over the first nine months of this year. Most European students don’t come here seeking permanent residence, so the quality concerns associated with migration-fuelled study aren’t an issue. Nor is language – at least for north-western Europe, where people start learning English in primary school. And English-language skills have improved markedly in recent years in Central Europe, not to mention the once anglophobic France. Meanwhile the student visa processing issues that have torpedoed enrolments from other regions haven’t affected Europe, where many countries enjoy the lowest available risk assessment rating. Among the 27 European Union states, only Romania is ranked high-risk, and only then for VET and English-language students. In fact, student visas – always relatively easy to obtain in Western Europe – have become even easier, says Anne-Sophie Morvan of the Paris-based agents Francaustralia Education. In mid-2009 the five-week waiting period was reduced to a few days, and Australia abandoned its its requirement for health checks from immigration department-approved doctors, she says. “We’re assessment level 1, so it’s easy in France. They apply online through the immigration website, and they get their electronic visa within a few days.” All this may explain why student flows from Europe appear to be holding up better than most. Enrolments from the top nine European markets – the UK, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Norway, Poland, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland – have all recorded consecutive increases over the past two years, according to year-to-date figures from Australian Education International (AEI). As a bloc, Europe ranks behind only China and India in raw enrolment and commencement numbers. And trends suggest it may soon displace India. While people from the EU, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland represented about 6.5 per cent of overseas students in Australia in the nine months to September, they accounted for 8.4 per cent of the new enrolments – suggesting more growth ahead. Of course the high exchange rate for the Australian dollar – the bane of our export industries – is affecting Europe, just like other markets. But some Europeans are more worried about a different sort of exchange rate. “Applications for Australia are skyrocketing, but it’s difficult to get Australian students over here,” says Dr Irene Jansen, head of communication and marketing with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). “It’s difficult to negotiate anything beyond incoming revenue.” According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), more than 1900 German higher education students went to Australia in 2008. Fewer than 400 Australians went to Germany. The situation is similar in France, which sent more than 1000 higher education students to Australia, and received fewer than 300. “Many [Australian] universities sign exchange agreements with universities and schools here in France, but they send maybe one or two students every year,” says Morvan. German and French student exchanges with Australia yield returns of about 20 to 30 per cent in raw student numbers, according to IIE figures. And that’s pretty good compared to other countries. In 2008 Australia hosted more than 135,000 higher education students from its top 10 markets, according to AEI. It sent just 9300 to its top 10 overseas destinations, according to IIE – an average exchange rate of less than 7 per cent. And it’s worse for some institutions, says Morvan, who cites a French business school where it’s mandatory for final-year bachelor students to study overseas. “Out of 400 students each year, about 100 go to Australia. They have about three or four Australians coming every year.” But a few European universities do much better. SciencesPo, an elite Paris-based social sciences institute, says it has a surplus of Australians. While 54 of its students are in Australia for a year’s study, 141 Australians are at Sciences-Po. And while most of the Australians are in France for just a semester, more than a quarter are there for the whole year. The University of Uppsala, near Stockholm, receives more than 100 Australian students a year. Cecilia Arefalk, head of Uppsala’s international office, credits the university’ student-friendly environment. “They keep coming back – they feel like they have two universities as their alma mater,” she says. “They are fascinated by being here. It’s the oldest university in the Nordic countries. Uppsala is an attractive university and an attractive town. It’s a student town. Stockholm is not a student town – that’s a huge difference.” But Arefalk has worked hard at the relationship, and Uppsala now has institutional exchange partnerships with 17 Australian universities. Arefalk says student numbers really built up about a decade ago after students started gaining credit for their Swedish studies – particularly in law, the dominant field for Australian students. DAAD says Australia needs an organisation capable of facilitating exchanges at the national level. In the absence of such an agency, the Group of Eight has generally led the way. All Go8 universities have partnerships with both SciencesPo and Uppsala, for example. At the state level, Queensland’s universities have a multi-institution agreement with the German state of Hessen. Hessen universities are bolstering their English-taught content to help attract students from Queensland and elsewhere. Frankfurt’s University of Applied Sciences, Fachhochschule, now offers three masters programs delivered fully in English. A further five masters and nine bachelor programs are partly taught in English. Across Germany, more than 1000 international degree programs are now taught partly or completely in English, says DAAD. And Arefalk says Uppsala was also quick to embrace English-language teaching, enabling it to extend beyond its early relationships with universities such as Melbourne, which have Swedish language programs. “We teach about 600 undergraduate subjects in English. So we can recruit students from any field of study. It’s not restricted to language and culture courses.” But if language can be an enabler, it can also be a barrier. Australian students feel little compunction to take themselves out of their comfort zone and tackle life in a foreign language and culture. “In Australia, what’s the point to learn another language?” Morvan asks. Foreign higher education students, mostly non-native English speakers, are coming here at roughly 15 times the rate Australian students go to their universities – even though many of these universities have taken the trouble of developing English curriculums. Another factor that’s way out of balance is money. Australian universities charge upwards of $10,000 a year for foreign undergraduates to study their courses. Institutions in most European countries charge our students somewhere between $1000 and $2000 a year. Universities in parts of Germany and Scandinavia charge nothing, while public French institutions – SciencesPo aside – charge what’s essentially an administrative fee of about $240 a year. The imbalance galls the French, who – unlike their German and Scandinavian counterparts – receive little state financial assistance to study abroad. “The fees mean some students couldn’t even consider to go to Australia, financially speaking,” Morvan says. “And even though some universities actually give some funds to Australian students to go overseas, it’s still difficult to attract Australian students to France.” Nevertheless, most European higher education agencies appear remarkably well-disposed towards an Australia that charges through the nose for a service they’re often prepared to provide for free. International education specialist Professor Marijk van der Wende says European administrations are unlikely to take any tit-for-tat action – such as singling out Australian students and hitting them with fees – because the flow of students from Australia is simply too low. And while Australia has developed a reputation for chasing profits, most Europeans are more focused on the quality of its universities and its lifestyle. Dr Ursula Toyka, who oversees DAAD’s exchanges with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Pacific, says there’s strong competition between highly qualified applicants in all the funding programs DAAD runs with Australia. “This is perhaps surprising, as in Germany many people used to think academics went to Australia primarily to sun and surf, without a very keen academic interest.” Mariette Christopherson, adviser to the Association of Norwegian Students Abroad, says Australia has some of the world’s best universities. “The trend now is not just for bachelor students to go to Australia. We’ve seen a big rise in the number of students wishing to do their masters degree in Australia. That reflects the higher quality Norwegians see in Australian universities.” Rather than resenting Australia’s commercially motivated recruitment drives, most Europeans seem to admire them. “Their marketing is excellent – we try to learn from this,” Toyka says. But not everybody. Bjørn Einar Aas, senior research advisor at the University of Bergen, says his city “swarmed with Aussies” after Norway opened up as a higher education market for Australia in the late 1990s. “They had posters everywhere. They wanted to set up a recruiting stand at the student centre. We said no. “We were not commercial at all. We wanted to have credit mobility within an academic program – mobility of students, in co-operation with outside universities. They wanted students to go there from day one – to do the whole bachelor or masters in Australia.” Norway is still Australia’s fifth biggest European market, contributing about 2200 enrolments last year. But it used to be a lot bigger, peaking at about 4000 students between 2001 and 2004, when Australia was the most popular destination for Norwegian students. Now it’s number three behind the UK and Denmark, with Poland and the US nipping at its heels. That’s probably a more realistic position for a distant and relatively small country. But the commercial image of Australian higher education hasn’t gone down well in Norway – a country that is adamant it won’t take university fees from anybody, and that spends a lot of money to send its own students overseas. Christopherson says Norway’s higher education community had to fight a rearguard action against a tabloid depiction of study in Australia as a taxpayer-funded lark. “The media tried to portray studying in Australia as a year of surfing and holidaying and sunning yourself on the beach with fellow Norwegians,” Christopherson says. Formal exchange programs help to dispel the commercial image by lightening the load on the taxpayer’s purse. Students pay the tuition fees of their home university – not the host university – so the Norwegian government doesn’t have to subsidise lofty Australian fees. But the lame take-up of academic exchanges by Australian students is preventing the programs from growing, says DAAD. “Organisations like ours are reluctant to increase the budget for Australia unless exchange figures get more balanced,” Jansen says. “As long as they’re not coming, we won’t increase the budget. If they were coming, we might be able to do a lot more.” In raw number terms, it’s a zero sum game. If Australia is depriving itself of potential German students, it’s keeping an equal number of Australians at home. No net loss, of students or income. But Jansen says that for Germany, student exchange is just the start of something much bigger. “They really have a more strategic approach in mind – that eventually the professors would exchange projects and co-operate on various levels,” she says. “We are really looking at partnership approaches, at exchanges, at strategic alliances – something that’s sustainable and will eventually lend itself to broader co-operation.” To understand where Germany is coming from, Jansen says, you have to look at where it’s come from. “After 1945, Germany had a particular interest in becoming an internationally acceptable country again – an inviting country, democratic and open-minded. Now we’re the land of the free and equal, and everybody who performs well has to have access. “That applies to foreigners as well. And we desperately need those foreigners, in laying the foundation for friendship between cultures and countries.” Sending out German students is just as important, Jansen says. “We hope that in addition to furthering their education, they will come home with interesting networks.” Australia will undoubtedly feature in those networks. But as things stand, Australian students aren’t developing many networks of their own.The situation is similar in France, which sent more than 1000 higher education students to Australia, and received fewer than 300. “Many [Australian] universities sign exchange agreements with universities and schools here in France, but they send maybe one or two students every year,” says Morvan. German and French student exchanges with Australia yield returns of about 20 to 30 per cent in raw student numbers, according to IIE figures. And that’s pretty good compared to other countries. In 2008 Australia hosted more than 135,000 higher education students from its top 10 markets, according to AEI. It sent just 9300 to its top 10 overseas destinations, according to IIE – an average exchange rate of less than 7 per cent. And it’s worse for some institutions, says Morvan, who cites a French business school where it’s mandatory for final-year bachelor students to study overseas. “Out of 400 students each year, about 100 go to Australia. They have about three or four Australians coming every year.” But a few European universities do much better. SciencesPo, an elite Paris-based social sciences institute, says it has a surplus of Australians. While 54 of its students are in Australia for a year’s study, 141 Australians are at Sciences-Po. And while most of the Australians are in France for just a semester, more than a quarter are there for the whole year. The University of Uppsala, near Stockholm, receives more than 100 Australian students a year. Cecilia Arefalk, head of Uppsala’s international office, credits the university’ student-friendly environment. “They keep coming back – they feel like they have two universities as their alma mater,” she says. “They are fascinated by being here. It’s the oldest university in the Nordic countries. Uppsala is an attractive university and an attractive town. It’s a student town. Stockholm is not a student town – that’s a huge difference.” But Arefalk has worked hard at the relationship, and Uppsala now has institutional exchange partnerships with 17 Australian universities. Arefalk says student numbers really built up about a decade ago after students started gaining credit for their Swedish studies – particularly in law, the dominant field for Australian students. DAAD says Australia needs an organisation capable of facilitating exchanges at the national level. In the absence of such an agency, the Group of Eight has generally led the way. All Go8 universities have partnerships with both SciencesPo and Uppsala, for example. At the state level, Queensland’s universities have a multi-institution agreement with the German state of Hessen. Hessen universities are bolstering their English-taught content to help attract students from Queensland and elsewhere. Frankfurt’s University of Applied Sciences, Fachhochschule, now offers three masters programs delivered fully in English. A further five masters and nine bachelor programs are partly taught in English. Across Germany, more than 1000 international degree programs are now taught partly or completely in English, says DAAD. And Arefalk says Uppsala was also quick to embrace English-language teaching, enabling it to extend beyond its early relationships with universities such as Melbourne, which have Swedish language programs. “We teach about 600 undergraduate subjects in English. So we can recruit students from any field of study. It’s not restricted to language and culture courses.” But if language can be an enabler, it can also be a barrier. Australian students feel little compunction to take themselves out of their comfort zone and tackle life in a foreign language and culture. “In Australia, what’s the point to learn another language?” Morvan asks. Foreign higher education students, mostly non-native English speakers, are coming here at roughly 15 times the rate Australian students go to their universities – even though many of these universities have taken the trouble of developing English curriculums. Another factor that’s way out of balance is money. Australian universities charge upwards of $10,000 a year for foreign undergraduates to study their courses. Institutions in most European countries charge our students somewhere between $1000 and $2000 a year. Universities in parts of Germany and Scandinavia charge nothing, while public French institutions – SciencesPo aside – charge what’s essentially an administrative fee of about $240 a year. The imbalance galls the French, who – unlike their German and Scandinavian counterparts – receive little state financial assistance to study abroad. “The fees mean some students couldn’t even consider to go to Australia, financially speaking,” Morvan says. “And even though some universities actually give some funds to Australian students to go overseas, it’s still difficult to attract Australian students to France.” Nevertheless, most European higher education agencies appear remarkably well-disposed towards an Australia that charges through the nose for a service they’re often prepared to provide for free. International education specialist Professor Marijk van der Wende says European administrations are unlikely to take any tit-for-tat action – such as singling out Australian students and hitting them with fees – because the flow of students from Australia is simply too low. And while Australia has developed a reputation for chasing profits, most Europeans are more focused on the quality of its universities and its lifestyle. Dr Ursula Toyka, who oversees DAAD’s exchanges with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Pacific, says there’s strong competition between highly qualified applicants in all the funding programs DAAD runs with Australia. “This is perhaps surprising, as in Germany many people used to think academics went to Australia primarily to sun and surf, without a very keen academic interest.” Mariette Christopherson, adviser to the Association of Norwegian Students Abroad, says Australia has some of the world’s best universities. “The trend now is not just for bachelor students to go to Australia. We’ve seen a big rise in the number of students wishing to do their masters degree in Australia. That reflects the higher quality Norwegians see in Australian universities.” Rather than resenting Australia’s commercially motivated recruitment drives, most Europeans seem to admire them. “Their marketing is excellent – we try to learn from this,” Toyka says. But not everybody. Bjørn Einar Aas, senior research advisor at the University of Bergen, says his city “swarmed with Aussies” after Norway opened up as a higher education market for Australia in the late 1990s. “They had posters everywhere. They wanted to set up a recruiting stand at the student centre. We said no. “We were not commercial at all. We wanted to have credit mobility within an academic program – mobility of students, in co-operation with outside universities. They wanted students to go there from day one – to do the whole bachelor or masters in Australia.” Norway is still Australia’s fifth biggest European market, contributing about 2200 enrolments last year. But it used to be a lot bigger, peaking at about 4000 students between 2001 and 2004, when Australia was the most popular destination for Norwegian students. Now it’s number three behind the UK and Denmark, with Poland and the US nipping at its heels. That’s probably a more realistic position for a distant and relatively small country. But the commercial image of Australian higher education hasn’t gone down well in Norway – a country that is adamant it won’t take university fees from anybody, and that spends a lot of money to send its own students overseas. Christopherson says Norway’s higher education community had to fight a rearguard action against a tabloid depiction of study in Australia as a taxpayer-funded lark. “The media tried to portray studying in Australia as a year of surfing and holidaying and sunning yourself on the beach with fellow Norwegians,” Christopherson says. Formal exchange programs help to dispel the commercial image by lightening the load on the taxpayer’s purse. Students pay the tuition fees of their home university – not the host university – so the Norwegian government doesn’t have to subsidise lofty Australian fees. But the lame take-up of academic exchanges by Australian students is preventing the programs from growing, says DAAD. “Organisations like ours are reluctant to increase the budget for Australia unless exchange figures get more balanced,” Jansen says. “As long as they’re not coming, we won’t increase the budget. If they were coming, we might be able to do a lot more.” In raw number terms, it’s a zero sum game. If Australia is depriving itself of potential German students, it’s keeping an equal number of Australians at home. No net loss, of students or income. But Jansen says that for Germany, student exchange is just the start of something much bigger. “They really have a more strategic approach in mind – that eventually the professors would exchange projects and co-operate on various levels,” she says. “We are really looking at partnership approaches, at exchanges, at strategic alliances – something that’s sustainable and will eventually lend itself to broader co-operation.” To understand where Germany is coming from, Jansen says, you have to look at where it’s come from. “After 1945, Germany had a particular interest in becoming an internationally acceptable country again – an inviting country, democratic and open-minded. Now we’re the land of the free and equal, and everybody who performs well has to have access. “That applies to foreigners as well. And we desperately need those foreigners, in laying the foundation for friendship between cultures and countries.” Sending out German students is just as important, Jansen says. “We hope that in addition to furthering their education, they will come home with interesting networks.” Australia will undoubtedly feature in those networks. But as things stand, Australian students aren’t developing many networks of their own. Real value What matters more: short-term revenue or long-term gain? It’s a question that resonates in Australian research circles, where much effort is expended trying to commercialise new discoveries. But some say the real value of a nation’s research is as a ticket to international research. They reason that no matter how much research Australia produces, it will only ever be a tiny proportion of the global output. But if it shares what it has, it can claim a seat at the table of the world’s researchers. Australia should ask itself the same question about the real value of its teaching, according to Bjørn Einar Aas, the immediate past president of the European Association of International Education. “There’s always been two internationalisations in Australia,” Aas told Campus Review. “One relates to students, and has been money-driven. But there’s always been an interest in collaboration in research. “You’ve come to the end of the road, maybe, when it comes to commercialisation. I think this co-operation approach is now becoming more important to Australian universities. When you see it in the long term – and universities must be seen in a long-term perspective – institutional co-operation is what brings results.” Erasmus Mundus scholarships unbalanced The depth of Australian students’ unwillingness to venture overseas has been highlighted by new European Commission figures, which show Australia is one of just a handful of countries where more academics than students are awarded Erasmus Mundus scholarships. Erasmus Mundus provides scholarships for students and academics from “third countries” – those outside the European Union – to study and research in groups of EU universities. Almost 170 countries participated in 2009-10, with the bulk of the scholarships going to students – almost 1800, compared to less than 500 for academics. In most countries, student scholarship recipients easily outnumbered the academics. But not in Australia, where academics outnumbered students 33 to 16. Australia was one of just seven countries with scholarships significantly skewed towards academics. The others included Japan and the US, but not other comparable countries such as Canada and New Zealand. Erasmus Mundus program manager Pedro Martinez Macias told Campus Review that the success of Australian academics reflected the quality of Australia’s teaching staff. But he said the low showing by students was “curious”.