In what is being heralded as a positive step towards Turkey’s ambition of becoming an education hub, the country’s Council of Higher Education (YÖK) has announced that limitations on the number of international students accepted to study at Turkish universities have been abolished.
Prior to the announcement, universities could only accept international students if their total number did not exceed 50% of the overall student quota that each university defined annually for new admissions.
“The goal is to make Turkey a centre of attraction for higher education opportunities”
According to a report in theDaily Sabah medicine and dentistry courses will be the only exception where the 50% quota will still apply.
“However, universities with enough facilities to house a large number of students and meet criteria for education standards will be allowed to admit any number of students into these branches, providing a separate class for them,” the report stated.
Medicine and dentistry courses will be the exceptions where the 50% quota will still apply
YÖK president Yekta Saraç explained that the goal is to make Turkey “a centre of attraction for higher education opportunities”.
He pointed out that YÖK took the first steps to achieve this goal by setting up an international relations department and drafting a strategic plan for international efforts.
“I think we are conducting a successful process,” Saraç said, noting that Turkey signed deals with 34 countries since the 1980s in cooperation on education and to boost the number of students choosing Turkey for higher education.
“The recognition of our universities, especially in neighbouring countries, increased and we get good results from our initiatives to make Turkey more known for its universities in Africa and the Balkans.”
Saraç added that they have seen “a leap” in the number of international students. According to statistics released by YÖK last year, 125,138 international students were in the country in 2017-18.
“This is the result of serious planning… a new student and lecturer exchange program, updated accredited diploma regulations, new scholarships and initiatives to attract qualified foreign lecturers played a role in the increase,” Saraç added.
Speaking with The PIE News, vice director for Global Education and Partnerships at Istanbul Aydin University and coordinator of EURIE Ayse Deniz Ozkan noted that the lifting of undergraduate restrictions is expected to increase international student numbers overall.
In the past, when YÖK deregulated university admission criteria to allow institutions to set their own admission criteria, total international student numbers increased.
“Particularly foundation universities tend to take initiative and develop proactive marketing and admission policies when regulatory frameworks allow,” she said.
“Some may open more English-taught programs where the majority of the students will be international”
However, it is key that universities now develop the right internationalisation strategy to suit their individual institution.
“Some may open more English-taught programs, possibly where the majority of the students will be international,” Ozkan explained.
“We may see over-concentration of international students in certain study fields. These may create new challenges for university administrations.”
“It will be up to the universities themselves to navigate through this new era by setting the right admissions criteria and competitive tuition fees and by offering quality academic programs, and more services and support structures for international students,” Ozkan added.
Over the past five years, Australia experienced a massive boom in international student numbers, whereby the number of student visas on issue ballooned by around 200,000 to half-a-million as at the end of 2018:
As shown in the next chart from The ABC, this international student growth has been driven by the Chinese, whose numbers have surged from around 95,000 in 2015 to 150,000 as at 2018. Chinese students also accounted for around $11 billion of Australia’s $32 billion in education export earnings in 2018:
tourism
Recently, we have received explicit warnings that Chinese students numbers have peaked and will likely fall into the future.
Last week, The Australianreported that “the highly lucrative six-year boom in Chinese students is over”:
Ahead of the release of official figures, a senior Department of Home Affairs official briefed universities last week telling them that visa applications from Chinese students were flat…
The flattening out in numbers of Chinese students starting courses is not yet visible in the monthly data issued by the federal Department of Education and Training.
The March figures, which will give the full picture of international student enrolments this year, are not yet available.
Whereas University of NSW Professor, Ian Jacobs, recently warned that Chinese student numbers will decline over the coming decade:
“They are getting more universities, and those are getting much better quality, very rapidly,” said Professor Jacobs. “The Chinese government understands education is everything if they are going to be the high tech country they aspire to be.”
“My assessment [is] over a 10-year period, [Chinese students] will gradually decrease. We are already starting to see a slight decrease in the number of undergraduate students from China as the opportunities increase.
March’s overseas arrivals and departures data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), released on Monday, supports these assessments. It showed that short-term arrivals from China declined for nine consecutive months, including both students and tourists. Moreover, arrivals in March 2019 were lower than August 2017:
There are a variety of possible reasons why the flow of Chinese students and tourists has stalled.
As noted by Ian Jacobs above, China is increasing investment in its own universities and lifting its standards. At the same time, Australian university standards have plummeted, as highlighted in last week’s Four Corners expose, which has no doubt eroded the prestige-value of an Australian degree.
Political tensions between Australia and China could also be reducing the flow of Chinese students and tourists. China may also want to keep more of both at home to prevent the outflow of capital and protect the value of its currency.
Increased competition for Chinese students from other Anglo nations could also be having an effect. Last month we learned that the Canadian Government plans to expand its presence overseas in order to significantly increase the volume of international students studying in Canada from 572,415 in 2018. The UK Government is also seeking to lift international students numbers by offering more generous work rights.
Unlike with commodities, Australia has no natural advantage in university education. Therefore, increasing competition from universities abroad (including from China) will make it increasingly difficult for Australia to maintain Chinese student numbers.
The policy response so far has been to pivot to lower quality students from Indian and Nepal, where instances of plagiarism, academic misconduct, and students failing their courses are more common. And with this pivot, Australian university standards will be lowered even further.
Yesterday, The Australianreported official data from the Department of Home Affairs showing that visa applications from Chinese students were flattening, forcing Australia’s universities to shift their focus to lower quality students from India and Nepal.
The economic activity arising from these three source countries is nicely encapsulated by the ABC below:
As shown above, international students from China, India and Nepal have each experienced explosive growth. However, there is a huge difference in the quality of these students.
Dr Bob Birrell from the Australian Population Research Institute (APRI) released a detailed study late last year showing that Chinese students tend to pay higher fees and study at higher quality Group of Eight (GoE) Universities, whereas Indian students typically study at cheaper institutions, often for the primary purpose of gaining access to employment and future permanent residency:
The first comprises universities charging very high fees – $40,000 or more a year by 2018. These are primarily the Group of 8 universities. Despite the princely cost, the number of overseas-student commencements at Go8 universities increased massively, by 56 per cent, between 2012 and 2016. Almost all of this increase came from Chinese students…
The second market covers universities other than those in the Go8, all of whom charge much lower (though still high) fees of around $25,000 per year. Overseas-student commencements in these universities increased by 41 per cent over the years 2012 to 2016. Most of this growth came from countries located in the Indian subcontinent, particularly India itself.
We show that the surge of enrolments in this second market has been largely due to the Australian government’s opening up of these opportunities in 2012 (pages 16-17). A key initiative was to allow all overseas student graduates (including those completing two-year Masters-by-Coursework degrees) to gain access to a work-study visa. This provides a minimum of two years in the Australian labour market after completion of a university degree, regardless of field of study.
Yet, despite Chinese students tending to pay more and attending higher quality Go8 universities, those that do stay and work in Australia perform poorly in the jobs market when compared against their Australian-born counterparts:
Chinese students who do stay on in Australia after graduation and enter the job market find it difficult to obtain employment at the professional or managerial levels. Employers expect their appointees to have complex problem solving, collaboration and communication skills. Many Chinese graduates lack these skills and thus struggle to compete with local graduates and with graduates from English-Speaking-Background (ESB) countries.
Data from the 2016 Census documents this point. Table 4 shows employment outcomes for young China-born males (aged 25-34) in Australia as of 2016, who arrived here between 2006 to 2016 and who held qualifications at degree level or above in Management and Commerce. Only 34.1 per cent were employed as managers or professionals. The outcome was similar for those with Engineering degrees, though a bit better for IT graduates.
Table 4 also indicates that a high proportion (some 31.4 per cent of those with management and commerce qualifications) were unemployed or not in the workforce. This is why we chose to focus on males. The high share of those not in the workforce category is unlikely to be explained by child care responsibilities.
True, it is not just a problem for the Chinese. Most graduates from non-English-speaking background (NESB) countries in business and commerce, engineering, and IT fields struggle to find professional level appointments in these fields. This is because there is a serious oversupply of entry-level candidates, relative to the available job openings.
So, if Chinese students tend to have low standards, what does this mean for our universities’ pivot towards students from India and Nepal?
Monday’s Four Corners special on Australia’s international student trade was especially damning of the quality of students coming from the Indian sub-continent, reporting widespread instances of plagiarism, academic misconduct, and students failing their courses. The below email to colleagues from Murdoch University’s Professor Benjamin Reilly encapsulates the problems:
“In semester one 2018 we experienced a surge in new international students into some postgraduate courses. This surge increased sharply in semester two 2018, with several hundred new students, mostly from the Punjab region of India, enrolling in a small number of postgraduate courses.
“While some were OK, many do not have the language skills to study at a postgraduate level and have thus been unable to participate in class or complete assessments for the units legitimately.
“Hence we now have a much larger number of academic misconduct issues, supplementary assessments and outright failures than we have previously experienced in the units in which this cohort has enrolled”…
As does correspondence from Dr Duncan Farrow, a maths lecturer and academic misconduct investigator:
“Perhaps the most telling statistic of them all: 48 of the 80 students admitted to the MIT in semester one this year had at least one academic misconduct finding against them,” he wrote.
“Not only was there a huge increase in numbers of misconduct cases but additionally the investigations were more difficult due to the poor language capabilities of many of the students involved.
“I have just reviewed the results for students from the Punjab region in BSC100 Building Blocks for Science Students and it is depressing. Of the 52 students in this category, 12 have passed the unit outright — a pass rate of less than 25 per cent.
Inside Story’s economics correspondent, Tim Colebatch, similarly raised the alarm on the torrent of low quality Nepalese students inundating Australia’s universities:
…one source stands out: the little Himalayan country of Nepal, just thirty million people, living in one of Asia’s poorest countries.
In 2017–18, one in every 1500 inhabitants of Nepal emigrated to Australia. In an era of strict immigration controls, that is an astonishing number for two countries so far apart, with no common language, heritage or ethnicity.
Over the five years to mid 2018, one in every 500 Nepalis emigrated to Australia — and that’s in net terms, after deducting those who returned. In 2017–18, little Nepal became Australia’s third largest source of migrants after India and China…
Deregulation has allowed universities to selectively lower their standards to bring in more fee-paying foreign students, even when they fail to meet the thresholds for English language skills or academic achievement…
This is not the first time immigration from Nepal has surged. A decade ago, we saw a scam with training visas, in which “students” from India and Nepal came for training courses in Australia, then quickly vanished into the workforce. The scam saw net immigration set record levels in 2008–09, before then immigration minister Chris Evans shut it down. But most of those who came stayed on here.
At the current pace of immigration, Australia will soon have more residents born in Nepal than in Greece.
The aggressive growth in international students has already unambiguously lowered university standards, flooded Australia’s labour market with cheap exploitative labour, as well as helped crush-load Australia’s cities.
The situation is likely to worsen as Australia’s universities pivot to lower quality students from India and Nepal in a desperate attempt to keep the fees rolling in.
“Since 2015, data on offshore VET students and VET courses delivered offshore can be extracted from the Total VET Activity (TVA) data collection.” These enrolment data can be found here, both for VET and higher education. Data for 2016 and 2015 are available at this site, and it also gives you access to earlier data for 2013 and 2014. You can use a ‘data slicer’ to focus your analysis.
“Australian training providers delivering VET programs to offshore students reported 36,765 program enrolments in over 40 offshore locations in 2017. The majority (92%) of VET program enrolments offshore were with public providers. China was the top offshore location for public training providers and Vietnam was the top offshore location for private training providers.”
Offshore provision is therefore relatively small in comparison to what’s happening onshore, as we reported in an article in the last edition.
In addition, the “number of Australian training providers delivering VET programs offshore increased from 53 in 2015 to 68 in 2017.” “More than half (58%) of VET program enrolments offshore were with providers in Victoria followed by providers in New South Wales (16%).” In terms of what they studied in 2017:
“Management & Commerce was the top broad field of education for offshore VET students (45% of all enrolments) followed by Engineering & Related Technologies (15% of enrolments), although enrolments in these fields did not grow in 2017. Offshore enrolments did grow in the fields of Education (by 41%), Health (by 25%) and Food, Hospitality & Personal Services (by 19%). Offshore enrolments in Natural & Physical Sciences field more than tripled from 70 in 2016 to 265 in 2017.”
Insights from students studying offshore
Authored by Justin Brown and his colleagues, the Australian Council for Educational Research have produced a reportwhich is based on the analysis of quantitative data collected through the “first ever global survey of students enrolled in Australian VET courses overseas” and supported by “analysis of qualitative data collected through a series of focus groups with students located in two Chinese provinces.” The report was published in late December 2018.
The report found that “Australian VET offshore includes a diverse mix of partnerships and delivery models.” The majority are delivered through partnering arrangements with in-country providers and are contextualised to local needs as well as providing an Australian qualification.
What do these offshore students think? First, “Most students are enrolled in international programs because their school or college recommended it to them.” In fact, “two-thirds of students had enrolled in an international major (i.e. with Australian content) because their
school or college recommended it.” However, “parent(s) or family members were rated highly by students as playing an important role in their choice of course.” Second, “students use and trust information but are looking for more information on outcomes and pathways.” Students highly rate trusted information about the course, especially in relation to costs and affordability. Having English as the language of instruction is seen as highly desirable because it makes them more employable. Other key outcomes relate to employment and accessing pathways into higher level qualifications. In their view, having both a local and Australian qualification “creates a point-of-difference in an increasingly competitive job market.”
