Abstract
Between 1990 and 2007 Australia ’s share of the global market in cross-border degrees grew from 1 to 7% (OECD 2009). Full fee-paying foreign students constitute one-fifth of on-shore enrolments and education has become Australia ’s third largest export. Positioned as an Anglo-American system on the edge of Asia, Australia has differentiated itself from education in the USA and UK on the basis of price, location, safety and climate, rather than academic content. The supply-side drivers of growth have been a prolonged reduction in the public funding of universities—Australia is the only OECD nation that both markedly increased private funding and markedly reduced public funding between 1995 and 2002—which installed economic dependence on foreign students and positioned university leaders as drivers of the business model and export growth; and entrepreneurship, marketing and non-academic servicing of students in the context of price and volume deregulation of foreign places. But the global position of Australian higher education is less strong in research and doctoral education than in the global market in cross-border degrees. Australia ’s policy-driven global positioning may have negative implications for the longer-term global standing of its knowledge economy and limit the position-taking strategies available to its research universities.
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Notes
- 1.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past”—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx 1969, p. 398).
- 2.
The first version of the chapter was delivered as an address to the 9–11 February 2005 conference of the Australian Technology Network universities in Melbourne, Australia . It was subsequently developed in presentations to the Universities of Western Sydney, Western Australia , South Australia and New England, Curtin and Griffith Universities ; and the annual conference of the Tertiary Education Managers, and revised for Studies in Higher Education. The author’s grateful thanks go to all of those, too numerous to mention individually, who shared in the processes of discussion, feedback and media debate on the paper in Australia .
- 3.
However more than one quarter of Germany ’s ‘foreign students’ are residents, mostly the children of migrant workers not granted citizenship (OECD 2005, p. 254).
- 4.
The UK and New Zealand also adopted a commercial approach to foreign students and have rapidly increase market revenues; but in both nations public expenditure on education institutions increased in 1995–2002. Public expenditure in 2002 was 72.0% of total expenditure in the UK, 62.5% in New Zealand and 48.7% in Australia (OECD 2005, p. 198).
- 5.
GDP measured in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).
- 6.
According to Butler (2003) between 1988 and 1998 Australia ’s share of publications in the Science Citation Index increased by 25%, but its share of citations declined from sixth in a ranking of 11 OECD countries in 1988, to tenth place by 1998, and there was a widening gap to ninth place. “Australia ’s increase in output appears to be at the expense of impact” (Butler 2003, p. 147). One reason was that a growing proportion of Australian articles were published in lower status journals. These achieved the same public funding within Australia as high status journals and were easier to access.
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Marginson, S. (2011). Global Position and Position-taking in Higher Education: The Case of Australia. In: Marginson, S., Kaur, S., Sawir, E. (eds) Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1500-4_20
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