You’ve got to hand it to Australia’s universities: the buggers have got more front than Myers.
After years of denigrating Australia, undermining its national security by crawling to the Beijing regime and ruthlessly persecuting any of their students who dared speak out, Australia’s university sector is holding out their gilded begging-bowl to taxpayers. The universities have become too used to rolling in rivers of cash, courtesy of foreign students. Thanks to the Wuhan pandemic, that river has run abruptly dry.
As reported by Sky News above, Australia’s university sector is demanding a taxpayer bailout to help them overcome the financial shortfall left from the decline in international students.
This comes as new modelling by Universities Australia suggests Australian universities could stand to lose $16 billion by 2023, including between $3.1 and $4.8 billion this year alone.
Indicative of the above, La Trobe University is at risk of going broke in a matter of weeks, while its Vice-Chancellor continues to earn a massive salary
There’s the ultimate insult: vice-chancellors have run universities like private fiefdoms, raking in million-dollar salaries – even as they built their empires on the shakiest foundation imaginable. Any private business run on such a badly-exposed business model would deserve to go broke.
MB’s view is that this crisis is largely of the universities’ own making. They should never have built a model that relies so heavily on international students, especially from China.
This growth in international students was always unsustainable and absurd.
As was the growth in international student tuition fees, which universities have blown on bloated bureaucracies, research aimed at propelling universities up international rankings (in order to gain more international students), and shiny new buildings.
That’s leaving aside the unacceptable cancer of ideological conformity that’s suffocating academic freedom in our universities. If taxpayers are going to bail out universities, they’ve every right to demand massive reform.
Any taxpayer bailout of universities must come with strict conditions, including:
• An increase in English-language requirements to enter courses in order to improve student quality;
• Increased financial requirements to ensure international students can support themselves;
• Requirement to deliver educational and research activity relevant to Australian domestic students and to Australian industry needs;
• Increased teaching staff-to-student ratios;
• Pay caps on administrator pay (e.g. VC salaries capped at $500,000); and
• Expunging ties to the Chinese Communist Party, including shutting down Confucius Institutes.
The federal government should also launch a royal commission into the sector, examining the universities’ dependence on international students, entry and teaching standards, government funding, corruption, etc.
That last one will send a particular shiver up what passes for a spine in the academic bureaucracies.
Good.
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