When borders slammed shut, universities worldwide were forced to confront a glaring weakness in their business models: a reliance on international students to shore up revenue. Three years on, the sector shows no signs of curbing that dependence. Instead, it’s doubled down.
China’s reopening and demand that anyone pursuing degrees at foreign universities get back to class comes amid a heightened race among English-speaking countries to attract international students.
In Australia, where education is the fourth-biggest export, more than 28,000 Chinese returned to universities last month, with another 35,000 visa holders from the country still eligible. That’s on top of 746,000 total international enrollments last year, with top institutions expecting numbers to return to pre-Covid levels as early as 2025. The UK, US and Canada have also seen a fast snapback.
“We’ve seen a v-shaped recovery across the board,” said Jon Chew, global head of insights and analytics at Navitas, an Australia-based education services provider. With government funding of higher education declining across advanced economies, “universities need to make up for that shortfall” and competition to attract overseas students is intensifying, he said.
The pandemic upended the multibillion dollar international student market globally.
New enrollments plunged 46% in the US in 2020/21 as many overseas students deferred or paused their academic plans, according to Julie Baer, a research specialist at the New York-based Institute of International Education. In Australia, unions say staff took pay cuts of as much as 15% in 2020, while government figures show the higher education workforce slumped by 8.3% from 2020 to 2021.
Keen to avoid such pitfalls, universities are trying to future-proof their business models.
Australia is seeking to reduce its reliance on China, announcing a new education partnership with India this month that will make it easier for degrees earned in each other’s countries to be recognized. Deakin University will establish a branch campus in India — a common strategy that’s mitigated the impact of pandemic-induced border closures.
American and British universities are the most active in opening overseas campuses, accounting for about a third of such arrangements across theworld, according to the Cross-Border Education Research Team.
New York University, for example, also has degree-granting campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. Josh Taylor, its associate vice chancellor of global programs and mobility services, said international enrollments “remained very strong” throughout the pandemic under a program that allowed students to study at NYU campuses or centers in their home countries.
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