By Sean Healy
New enrolments by full fee-paying overseas students are set to drop following the crisis in the economies of south-east Asia.
So concerned are universities about the currency crisis that IDP Education Australia, which serves as the main recruiter for Australian universities in south-east Asia, has commissioned a report to detail exactly what the likely impact will be.
Already, however, evidence is mounting that the impact will be serious; universities such as the University of New South Wales are reporting enrolments of overseas students to be far slower than in previous years.
Queensland University of Technology has decided to allow overseas students to make part-payments on their fees, with the remainder due next March, in the hope of avoiding students pulling out due to an inability to pay straightaway.
RMIT, which has the second highest level of overseas students behind UNSW, has noted a 24% lower number of inquiries than was expected by this time of the year.
The depreciation of the currencies of south-east Asia means that the cost of a degree will increase by as much as 100%. Countries affected by the currency depreciation include Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, which provide the overwhelming bulk of Australia's overseas students.
Since the previous Labor government allowed the imposition of tuition fees for overseas students in the mid-1980s, they have become an extremely valuable source of income for universities.
Overseas students pay more than $1.3 billion in fees each year. Numbers have risen dramatically, from 8000 in 1987 to 143,000 in 1997. Its overall economic contribution of $3 billion makes education Australia's fifth largest export earner.
Funds obtained from overseas students' fees are also central to universities' financial planning. For example, RMIT is counting on an increase in overseas student enrolments of 52% between this year and 2000 to meet its financial goals.
The overseas student market is an example of the road that university education as a whole is going down — towards education being seen first and foremost as an "industry", as a money earner.
The imposition of fees on overseas students set the stage for the first fees on domestic undergraduates in 1986, and the massive expansion in fee-paying overseas students in the last few years has set the stage for a similar attempted expansion in domestic fee-paying students.
If the impact on university revenue is as expected, university students (both overseas and domestic) can expect a speeding of plans to cut staff, slash services and raise tuition fees at all levels of tertiary education in a desperate attempt to make up the revenue shortfall.