Occasional Paper - TAFE Directors Australia

60
International students and
skilled migration:
re-appraising the relationship
• How are we managing the relationship
between migration and education
• How are we managing the impact of recent
changes to government policy on students/
providers
• Decoupling education and migration: what are
the right settings
MARK CULLY
Chief Economist, Department of Immigration
and Citizenship
After graduating with an Honours degree in
Economics from Adelaide University,
Mark was a public servant in Canberra, a
Commonwealth Scholar at the University of
Warwick and a civil servant in Whitehall.
While head of research on industrial
relations for the UK Government in the late
1990s, he ran what was the world’s largest
survey of working life, which was the basis
for his second book, Britain at Work.
In 1999, he joined the National Institute of
Labour Studies at Flinders University, and
was then General Manager at the National
Centre for Vocational Education Research for
six years, running its statistical and then
research operations. Mark was a speaker at
the inaugural Adelaide Festival of Ideas in
1999 and chaired the advisory committee
which prepared the Festival program from
2003 to 2007. He joined the Department in
January 2009 as its inaugural Chief
Economist.
Synopsis
Australia has been a pioneer in the large-scale
provision of international education. In absolute
terms, Australia sits fourth in the world, while on
a per capita basis it is (most likely) first. During
2009, there were close to half a million international
students in Australia, up more than three-fold from
ten years earlier. There are distinctive features that
underwrote this boom, notably allowing students to
transition to permanent residence while onshore.
Some accounts examine the international student as
sovereign consumer, free to choose which country
offers the best experience and cost package. The
approach I take is from a different perspective,
that of the sovereign state. It is the state which
determines whether to allow international students
passage to enter and live in its territory, and under
what conditions. At heart, the state must consider
how the national interest is served by international
students. There are three different roles that
international students play in the host country:
consumers of education services; members of the
resident population; and putative skilled migrants.
Within this framework, the Australian experience
between 1998 and 2008 can be characterised as a
commercialisation phase, one where the national
interest coalesced with the self-interest of education
providers in favouring growing numbers of students.