Australian universities – already highly leveraged on overseas student income – confront a ‘perfect storm’ in the wake of an escalating debate over poor English standards among many of their Asian students.

Reputation is everything to universities and drives a virtuous circle of attracting the best staff, who attract grants and who attract the best students. But Central Queensland University – originally named in research that found over a third of former overseas students who applied for permanent residency in Australia weren’t competent in English – has drawn all domestic universities into what has been branded an “immigration racket” in the press.
 
CQU says it is being victimised for the success of its international student operations, instead claiming that every university does just as CQU does "only not as well". CQU has downtown campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast that concentrate in business management, information technology and accounting, courses in the areas of the country’s skills shortages and that count more points to permanent residency.

CQU spokesman, Mr Marc Barnbaum, told the Sydney Morning Herald: "We might have a few disgruntled students, but to take the whole institution as rogue … The sandstones [older universities] do the same thing only, we would argue, not as well."

And Central Queensland University Sydney International Campus Associate Director- Academic, Dr Alison Owens, has said international students can walk the walk without talking all the talk.

Their comments follow another high profile hunger strike – this time by 60 of CQU’s master's students in Melbourne, who claimed 56 had been failed and 122 made to sit a second exam to get their master's degree after they were tested on content they had not been taught.

The latest controversy follows headlines in early March when the BBC among others reported n the controversy and original research by Monash University academic Bob Birrell that a third of the new permanent residents tested as incompetent in English.

It’s headline was a mild: “Students' English skills attacked.” But in the US, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the story with the headline “Academic Caliber of Foreign Students at Australian U.'s Debated”
Pakistan’s Daily Times reported that ‘Asians graduate in Australia despite bad English’, and China’s business newspaper, The Standard, reported that ‘Asians failed to make English study grade’.

As the Howard government has driven down non-research funding in the past decade as part of a conscious strategy to wean universities off the public purse, the universities have been forced to reshape themselves to win a sustainable slice of the global overseas student market.

They have been very successful. Almost 400,000 overseas students are enrolled in Australian education programs here and overseas, contributing an estimated $10 billion per annum to the national economy and sustaining and subsidising many domestic programs.

But the downward pressures of lowering public dollars per student and effective annual cuts under inadequate indexation arrangements dating from the last federal Labor government, have made universities so reliant upon overseas students that state auditors have been warning universities of the financial dangers of being so overly leveraged for years.

The lucrative income stream is well known to be vulnerable to external threats such as SARS and the Asian financial crisis, but has also been coping for a number of years with the maturation of its traditional source country markets. So they have turned to the emerging markets of China and India and elsewhere.

However now to everyone’s horror, the private and not so private warnings that students’ English was not up to the task of learning has been confirmed with the first empirical evidence of Birrell’s research. Birrell wrote in ‘People and Place’ in March that around a third of the former overseas students who were granted permanent residency and tested did not achieve the ‘competent’ band 6 standard.

Of those from South Korea 55.5 per cent did not meet the ‘competent’ band six. Of those from Thailand it was 50.9 per cent, Nepal 47.9 pc, Taiwan 47.4 pc, China 43.2 pc, Hong Kong 42.9 pc, Bangladesh 42 pc, Japan 36.8 pc, Vietnam 32.9 pc, Indonesia 32 pc, Sri Lanka 25 pc, Pakistan 24.8pc, Malaysia 23.5 pc, Singapore 17.8 pc and India 17.3 pc.

Rather they scored just 5 or 5.5 on the IELTS standard, a level that Birrell pointed out would have barred them from a visa application; admittance into most universities which require a 6 for those from offshore; and certainly not credible winning of a degree where the language of instruction was English.

Federal government and university authorities did their best to hold the line and played down the research. Federal Education Minister, Ms Julie Bishop, has rejected the research saying she has seen no evidence that substandard students with poor English are being passed by universities.

Likewise the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee has said most foreign students would be proficient in reading, writing and listening to English, and what has been instead highlighted is a deficiency in spoken language. This would not prevent students from completing a university course, the AVCC says.

But already the National Liaison Committee for Overseas Students in Australia has urged education institutions to increase their English language and welfare support.

NLC National convenor, Mr Eric Yenz Pang, warned the implications of Australian graduates being unable to speak good English upon return home was “bad” not just for graduates, but Australian universities themselves.

The qualification would lose value and Pang even warned that enrolment numbers would decline.

There are positive moves as the Federal Government has indicated it is considering tightening English standard requirements from a IELTS 5 to a 6.

But key observers have told Higher Ed Marketing that the problem is far more widespread – and deeper - than acknowledged.

One Australian academic who teaches and supervises students enrolled in the offshore Asian program of a highly reputable Australian university told HEM that the latest research was scratching the surface of the problem.
A typical workload for a supervisor of overseas students involved marking well over a hundred papers in barely comprehensible English in about a week, but the academic had encountered almost a score of cases of serious plagiarism.

Helping students improve their English, let alone going through the processes triggered by such findings made marking these papers a highly onerous exercise, the academic said.

Key observers say the debate will intensify – as indeed Federal and state authorities last week tried to shift responsibility to each other for regulation – and be renewed next year when the same research exercise is repeated.

It is a reasonable assumption that the problem – and the adverse publicity that marketers do not need or may indeed exploit – will not go away anytime soon.

Thousands more Asian students with substandard English are still working their way through the system as they complete their degrees over the next few years and will continue to be tested for their English under the research.

But publication of the research – which has been highly uncomfortable for universities and for which the researchers have been attacked – should prove beneficial in the medium to long run as rigor is restored to such a vital industry.