Australia’s drive for international students

Asia is the focus of new pathways to study, says Malcolm Gillies. Paul Keating, Australia’s prime minister back in the 1990s, once described Asia as the place you flew over to get to Europe. Europe, the place of true culture; Asia, well, the place you flew over to get there. Now Keating does most of his business in Asia. And Australia has an “Australia in the Asian Century” policy. No guessing why a former Treasury chief, Ken Henry, is now its champion.
Of course, Australia is really part of Asia, just as Britain is part of Europe. But both still stand apart from their larger continental neighbours despite growing confluence of trade, services and cultures.
Eighty per cent of Australia’s international students now come from Asia. China, India, Korea, Vietnam and Malaysia are the top five. Asia’s strong growth prospects for the coming decade led the British Council, in The Shape of Things to Come, its excellent report on emerging opportunities in international education, to forecast Australia as the stand-out winner in terms of new inbound students up to 2020, with the UK second, the US third and Canada fourth. Others - Germany, France and Japan - languish much further down the growth tables. Read more...