Simon Marginson

Is Australia Overdependent on International Students?

In East Asia and Singapore tertiary participation and scientific output are rising very rapidly, underpinned by economic growth, Confucian education values at home and the focused policies of governments determined to catch-up to North American and Western Europe. The leading research universities in China, Hong Kong SAR, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore are on course to join Japan in the front rank of the world's higher education institutions.

Australia's international education industry', a major export sector, slumped in 2010 because of more restrictive migration policy and visa processing, a crackdown on backdoor migration schemes, a high Australian dollar and tardy official response to racist violence affecting international students. A package of reforms in late 2011 freed up visa processing and work experience for graduates but so far industry recovery has been slow and uncertain.

Australian international education is in trouble, and the downgrade is likely to be large and long. Both demand for and the supply of Australian education are trending downwards. The main driver has been changes on the supply side, especially migration resistance in the Australian electorate. Government is reducing both the number of incoming students and of graduates who become permanent migrants. Part of Australia's share of the global student market will be absorbed by English-language competitors.

Vygotsky saw mental and cultural development as ‘mediated’ by artefacts, including tools and signs. He used his ‘genetic method’ to investigate higher cognitive processes in historical context. These insights are foundational to sociocultural theory, which is widely used in education research. However, since Vygotsky, communicative globalization has changed the conditions of theorization, research, policy and practice. Global convergence is characterized by extensive and intensive flows of people, messages, knowledge, ideas and money, and sudden, multiple and disjunctive changes. Educational activity is ‘glonacal’ activity, shaped simultaneously in global, national and local spheres. This article argues that nevertheless, once developed to incorporate global phenomena into the genetic method and the notion of mediating artefacts, Vygotsky's ideas have much to offer the analysis of globally affected educational practices. This conceptual approach combines the spatial insights of globalization theory with the socio-historical relational understandings enabled by the genetic method. It is illustrated by a case study on the learning to teach English practices of a cohort of Vietnamese pre-service teachers during their practicum. Global flows, media and artefacts, which are used extensively by these teachers, articulate with national and local practices and conventions in innovative ways.

For more than two decades, governments around the world, led by the English-speaking polities, have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. Reforms include corporatisation, competitive funding, student charges, output formats and performance reporting. But, no country has established a bona fide economic market in the first-degree education of domestic students. No research university is driven by shareholders, profit, market share, allocative efficiency or the commodity form. There is commercial tuition only in parts of vocational training and international education. While intensified competition, entrepreneurship and consumer talk are pervasive in higher education, capitalism is not very important. At the most, there are regulated quasi-markets, as in post-Browne UK. This differs from the experience of privatisation and commercialisation of transport, communications, broadcasting and health insurance in many nations. The article argues that bona fide market reform in higher education is constrained by intrinsic limits specific to the sector (public goods, status competition), and political factors associated with those limits. This suggests that market reform is utopian, and the abstract ideal is sustained for exogenous policy reasons (e.g. fiscal reduction, state control, ordering of contents). But, if capitalist markets are clearly unachievable, a more authentic modernisation agenda is needed.