When international students 'go home' Australia loses more than just money

Celeste Liddle, National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Organiser

There’s a real tendency to speak of international students as sources of income by the Government and university leadership. As university funding has been continuously cut by governments over the years – both Liberal and Labor – universities have become incredibly reliant on international students paying high fees choosing to study at their universities in order to boost operating budgets.

This outlook has gone hand-in-hand with an increasingly neoliberal push on campus, with universities pushed to become more like businesses than institutions of knowledge and, most recently, the passing of the JobReady Graduates legislation proving that the Government only values learning geared towards individuals becoming units of production they approve of following graduation.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the international student market has collapsed and in more ways than one, universities are going to be poorer for this in 2021.

Yet, I want to put all that aside and speak personally about international students in a way which does not revolve around finances. I have completed a Masters this year and 2020 has been an incredibly difficult year to undertake studies. The isolation of studying from a lounge room, separated from my classmates, lecturers and tutors, yet trying to form some sort of collegiality as we worked through the course materials was rough.

But what I was going through was nothing compared to some of my classmates. A very high proportion of the cohort I was in were international students and they were having an incredibly hard time.

Some of them had made it into Australia prior to the borders closing, only to be stranded in lockdown, their casual jobs gone and their families back home unable to assist because they were in the same situation. Helpfully (yes, I am being deeply sarcastic), the best our Prime Minister could come up with was to tell these students to 'Go home!'

Some of my classmates became reliant on community organisations and student unions this year in order to simply have something to eat.

Then there were my classmates who had been unable to get here prior to the border closure. It was a humbling moment for me when I realised that the tutorial I was attending was happening over ten different time zones. Some of my classmates were dialling in at 4am their time so they could complete the course requirements.

It’s more than the struggle though. As a domestic student, the amount of knowledge I gained from my international classmates was simply extraordinary. Their different worldviews and experiences challenged me endlessly and pushed me to gain a significantly broader education than I would have otherwise had.

We talk often about the world becoming more 'globally focussed' in the time of social media but I don’t think this is necessarily the case until you are thrust into an environment of knowledge exchange and you learn from the perspectives available to you. I found that my learning experience was enriched beyond measure due to the generosity of the cohort I was in. Universities don’t just stand to lose money next year, they stand to lose the unique insights that international students bring to class.

I’m concerned that due to this, students and staff are set to have a less rich experience on campus, particularly as an Aboriginal person who knows how hard our members work to embed Indigenous perspectives in the academy. That is if courses that attract international students are able to run at all. •