After spending eight of the last 15 years leading the education team at the Australian Embassy in Beijing, Iain Watt says the key to Australia retaining its strong position as competition increases both from within China and internationally is maintaining its reputation for quality qualifications. He spoke to Sophie Loras in the lead up to his return to Canberra.
“For most of the mid-last decade, (the period from 2003 to 2008), there were more Chinese students studying in Australia (at all levels) than studying anywhere else in the world,” says Iain Watt. “It’s pretty amazing given how small our system is compared to many European countries and the United States.”
This is just one of many observations, Mr Watt has made in his eight years leading the education team at the Australian Embassy in Beijing.
A lot has changed since Mr Watt first arrived in China in 1998 to take up his post overseeing Australia’s engagement with China’s education sector. In that time he has witnessed huge change in China’s own domestic education system and the hiccups for Australia in the last three years.
Arriving at a cusp of change in China in the late 1990s, Mr Watt remembers a time when less than 5 percent of Chinese year 12 graduates secured places at Chinese universities and Chinese students travelling to Australia were predominantly post-graduate students who required a minimum TOEFL score of 600 points.
Australia’s relaxation of visa rules for international students in 1998 (commencing with high school students, and then university students) and the design of the Assessment Level Framework, saw Australia experience huge growth in the international student market – especially out of China.
Australia moved from having 5000 Chinese student enrolments in 1997 to 50,000 in 2002. By 2010, that number had reached 167,000.
China has remained Australia’s top countries for international students. They continue to make up almost 30 percent of all international enrolments in Australia and 40 percent of all university enrolments.
What has distinguished Chinese students also from some of Australia’s other international students is their focus on education and quality qualifications as a pathway to better employment and career opportunities.
“There are relatively few [Chinese students] who are going to study in Australia purely for Permanent Residency,” says Mr Watt.
“From the education providers perspective, it’s always been a high quality destination in terms of genuine students, who were concerned about doing academically well and they were the kind of students the universities and the TAFEs and the schools wanted,” he says.
Since the late ‘90s, Mr Watt has observed other changes including the huge growth in China’s own university sector – the rapid expansion of Chinese universities now means more than 20 percent of Chinese school leavers enter a Chinese university – and the country has invested heavily in its scientific research sector, making it one of the worlds leading publishers of scientific papers.
But, while Australia, has in many ways, led the field in its engagement policies with the Chinese international student community, retaining its reputation as a destination for high quality education to attract China’s top students will remain a key challenge for the country, Mr Watt says.
He attributes Australia’s ongoing success in attracting Chinese students to Australia to strong strategic level engagement from government, universities and TAFEs.
These range from programmes such as a shadowing initiative between Universities Australia and its Chinese counterpart, CEAIE where Presidents and Vice Presidents from high profile Chinese universities shadow Australian Vice-Chancellors and Deputy Vice-Chancellors to see how western universities operate. Australian participants also visit Chinese universities to better understand how things work in China. Participants of this programme include the current Vice-Minister responsible for International Education and Presidents of leading universities including Tsinghua, Renmin and Nanjing.
This in turn has allowed Australian universities to lever off the strong relationships forged through these partnerships to better establish teaching and research collaborations with Chinese universities.
Mr Watt points to other key initiatives such as the then Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) establishment of the Australia-China Special Fund for Science and Technology Cooperation and a Young Scientists Exchange Program in 2000 and more recently, Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s announcement in April, to increase the Australia-China Science and Research Fund from $1 million a year from each country to $9 million each over three years
Australia is also one of the single largest providers of taught joint programmes in China of any foreign country, says Mr Watt, who estimates there are probably 60,000 Chinese students studying Australian taught programmes in China.
He says 75 percent of those Chinese students study VET, many with an option for articulation back to Australian campuses.
2,200 of the over 13,000 international PhD enrolments in Australia in 2011 are from China. Malaysia is the only other country that sends more than 1,000 (1400 in 2011)”
Despite unprecendented growth in the sector between 2006 and 2009, when international student enrolments in Australia reached growth of almost 20 percent year-on-year (when the link between migration and education hit its peak), followed by the collapse of several high profile private colleges, the appreciation of the Australian dollar, an increase in Australian university fees and the Australian government’s decision to sever the direct link between study and migration, China still continues to strongly contribute to Australia’s international education sector, says Mr Watt.
“The number of new students coming to Australia has been consistently falling for two to three years, but because there had been such strong growth in the preceding years, the pipeline of that growth – students moving from schools and foundation and language schools into universities was greater from some countries than the fall in the number of new students – so for a country like China the total number of enrolments kept growing in 2010 and will fall only slightly this year,” he says.
Today, China accounts for almost 30 percent of total international enrolments in Australia and almost 40 percent of university enrolments.
“The universities now are very dependent on Chinese students,” says Mr Watt.
“Across Australia, based on student load, one in 10 students you see on an Australian campus is an international student from China. If you look at Australian post graduate students doing a masters of business or management, it would be much higher,” he says.
Mr Watt says the key to retaining international students in Australia is through reputation.
“Australian universities as a whole have not compromised their entry standards and have retained and even improved academic standards so their reputations remain strong,” he says.
He commends the ongoing work of the Go8 (Group of Eight) in particular, which has established a very strong reputation in China.
Mr Watt says most Australian universities today have taken “a very strategic and big picture” approach to their involvement in China, which can include:
– Agent networks in China
– Articulation programmes
– Delivering programmes in China with Chinese partners
– Collaborative research programmes with Chinese universities and the Chinese Academy of Science
– Academic exchange programmes for staff
– And university to university agreements
“Because they have done that, they are less affected by swings and roundabouts in the market as there is much more depth and breadth to their relationships,” says Mr Watt.
Australian TAFEs, through TDA (TAFE Directors Australia), are developing similar relationships in China with similar success.
The private colleges in Australia however remain in an awkward bind – affected still from the fallout of 2009.
“They find it difficult because of the prejudice in China regarding private education –there is still a perception that public is better than private.” he says.
ACPET (Australian Council for Private Education and Training) has put substantial effort into this in the past 18 months and perceptions and positioning in China is beginning to improve.
The changing landscape in China
As the number of Chinese students returning to China seeking employment has expanded so too have the choices for Chinese employers.
A core finding observed by Michael Knight during his research for his 2011 government commissioned review of Australia’s student visa program, after speaking with agents, was that the single most important thing to make a difference to Chinese students in their choice of destinations “was around that ability to have work experience,” says Mr Watt.
Returning students with two years work experience on top of a bachelor’s or master’s degree versus coming straight back was completely different.
The future
“We had a honeymoon period in the last decade,” says Mr Watt.
“We had a share of international students out of China which was disproportionate – the idea that we could be getting a quarter of all Chinese students going overseas to a country the size of Australia from a country the size of China is inconceivable really.”
He says Australia now is returning to a more realistic model where a 10 percent market share in China “is about what we should be realistic about.”
“If we can maintain 10 percent that’s still very good because the number of Chinese students going out of China to study continues to grow 10-20 percent,” he says.
“More important is looking at improving the quality of the students we are recruiting so that each university can get better quality students who can contribute more to the university’s research effort, be better contributors in class and require less academic support such as English language,” he says.
“We need to have realistic expectations of what we can achieve in China. We are never ever going to have the kind of market share that we had five years ago.” ■
*Iain Watt returns to Canberra to take up a position with the Australian National University as Director of Student Recruitment and International |Operations.