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RMIT, Swinburne and La Trobe universities have all posted multimillion-dollar deficits as COVID-19 took a heavy toll on the institutionsâ finances.
But Victoriaâs other public universities all managed to achieve a surplus in 2020 despite the closure of Australiaâs borders to international students, annual reports tabled in State Parliament on Tuesday show.
RMIT University went from a $62.88m surplus in 2019 to a $55.93 deficit one year later.
Credit:Dianna Snape
RMIT University suffered the biggest deficit last year, reporting that it was $55.93 million in the red, compared with a $62.88 million surplus in 2019 â a turnaround of $118.81 million in one year.
A new survey of 6,000 prospective international students, conducted by student recruitment agency IDP and released on Thursday, found that students set on Australia were increasingly less willing to wait as the UK and Canada were more freely allowing students in.
Errol Phuah, the national president of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations, said Australia’s vaccine rollout was far behind Canada, the UK or the US.
“These are our competing countries, and they are smashing us,” he told Guardian Australia.
The IDP survey found that for students still planning on coming to Australia, only 7% said they would continue to study if their courses were fully online.
2021-04-28 14:06:02 GMT2021-04-28 22:06:02(Beijing Time) Xinhua English
SYDNEY, April 28 (Xinhua) Australia s international education sector is expected to halve by the end of next year due to continued border restriction, a new modelling revealed on Wednesday.
Continued border closures mean the value of Australia s international education sector is to shrink from 40.3 billion Australian dollars (31.23 billion U.S. dollars) in 2019 to 20.5 billion Australian dollars (15.89 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of 2022, a reduction nearly 50 percent, a new modelling from Victoria University s Mitchell Institute showed. There are currently about 260,000 fewer international students living in Australia than before the pandemic, that is a 45 percent reduction, said report author Dr Peter Hurley.
University income from foreign student fees collapses
Australia’s universities face a collapse in their income from foreign student fees, with AU$20 billion (US$15.5 billion) of the value of the international education sector expected to disappear by the end of 2022.
Higher education institutions are already facing financial upheaval as the flood of foreign students enrolling in Australian courses dries up.
A report released on Monday predicts that Australia’s continuing border closures that prevent foreign students enrolling will slash the value of Australia’s international education sector: collapsing from AU$40.3 billion in 2019 to AU$20.5 billion by the end of 2022.
The report, based on new modelling by Dr Peter Hurley from Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute in Melbourne, has uncovered the impact of a third academic year with no foreign students arriving in Australia.
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