The love affair with our sector's brand 'Future Unlimited' appears to be waning. At two of this year's major overseas education exhibitions, APAIE and NAFSA, all 39 Australian universities dropped the brand.
Image: Future Unlimited
Is there a future for 'Future Unlimited'?
Transparency on student feedback
The love affair with our sector's brand 'Future Unlimited' also appears to be waning. At two of this year's major overseas education exhibitions, APAIE and NAFSA, all 39 Australian universities dropped the brand. In the absence of anything else, they went with the simple badging over their combined stand of 'Australia' (which was quite effective actually).
And then we come to what should be our top priority, student services and student welfare. Happily, the International Student Barometer (ISB) 2016 indicated that the satisfaction levels of overseas students across a range of student experience criteria has continued to improve. A lot of hard work has been done by education providers and other stakeholders to ensure that young people are genuinely supported in their living and learning needs and expectations. There are, of course, many specific issues that are not dealt with in the ISB.
With the appointment of former Monash University DVCI, Stephanie Fahey, to the Austrade CEO role, we are hopeful that the current brand conundrum will somehow be sorted. There is no doubt that limited resources for Austrade's brand promotion have also had an adverse impact over recent years.
To its credit, Universities Australia requested the Human Rights Commission (HRC) to undertake a comprehensive survey of both domestic and international students' experience with sexual violence. The overarching 'Respect. Now. Always.' campaign has the laudable objective of seeking to create a safe environment for students, to reduce and eliminate sexual harassment and sexual assault, and to support those who experience it.
Our colleagues at Universities Australia are well aware that now the HRC results are released, it is going to be very difficult to control the messaging to offshore media. Few study destination countries have been willing to confront such sensitive student experience issues as this one. We hope that, globally, the international education community will see the 'Respect. Now. Always.' campaign as a genuine initiative to meaningfully address a challenge that all campuses must face. Recent commentary has focussed on Australia entering a 'Golden Age' for international student onshore and offshore delivery. Enrolment figures to date in 2017 would seem to bear this optimism out. However, complacency has never been part of the DNA of international education professionals. Clearly, as the year progresses, there are many challenges we still need to overcome. Phil Honeywood is CEO of IEAA.
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