Education is one of Western Australia’s top export industries, worth an estimated $1 billion a year, but changes in the market are making it hard for the state to compete.
In the late 1980s, when fee-paying international students started coming to Australia in large numbers, nearly one quarter of them chose Western Australia as their destination.
The international student market has grown significantly since then, but WA’s market share has fallen to about 9 per cent and is still sliding.
Since 2000, enrolments by international students have grown by 70 per cent nationally but by only 50 per cent in WA.
IBT Education managing director Rod Jones, who has watched the industry at close quarters, attributes WA’s early success to three main factors: the state’s close links with major markets including Singapore and Malaysia; solid state government support; and collaboration across the industry.
“We stole a real march over the rest of Australia through that cohesive approach,” Mr Jones told WA Business News.
The market became more competitive during the 1990s and WA failed to keep up with other states.
Mr Jones believes there was “a breakdown in relationships”, which meant universities were marketing for themselves rather than the state.
There was also a lack of state government support.
While WA lost its focus, other states learnt from our early success, according to Perth Education City chief executive Mike Ryan, whose job is to market WA to international students.
“The other states, notably Queensland and South Australia, really got their act together in the late 1990s,” Mr Ryan said.
“They adopted the collaborative approach of working together to market the destination rather than the institution.”
One of the biggest challenges now facing WA is the changing composition of the market.
Traditionally strong WA markets such as Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia have experienced only modest growth, or have gone backwards over the past five years, while students from fast growing markets like China, India, South Korea and Hong Kong have mainly gone to Sydney and Melbourne.
Data for the year to November 2005 highlights these trends.
Enrolments from India grew by 33 per cent but WA attracts less than 3 per cent of these students. Similarly, enrolments from China grew by 18 per cent but WA gets only about 5 per cent.
On the flipside, there was a fall in enrolments from WA’s traditional markets such as Malaysia (down 3.2 per cent), Singapore (down 8.7 per cent) and Indonesia (down 11 per cent).
University of WA international centre director Bruce McIntosh said the rising value of the dollar had made the Australian industry less competitive.
An added factor was internal competition, with recent moves by Singapore and Malaysia to promote the development of their own higher education sectors reducing the need for students to travel abroad.
Despite these difficult trends, the industry is very large in WA and remains critical to the state’s universities and many other businesses.
WA currently has about 30,000 international students, and nearly half come from just five locations – Malaysia, China, Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong.
The biggest player in the market is Curtin University; it was an early mover in the mid-1980s and nearly 40 per cent of its current student population is international.
“Strategically, international engagement is really important,” Curtin’s deputy vice-chancellor Jeanette Hacket said.
“That is not driven primarily by funding but a view that our university is most relevant if we have a clear place in the region.”
While professor Hacket believes students, staff and the university community all benefit from Curtin’s international links, she also acknowledges that the funding from fee-paying international students helps the university generally.
Only half of Curtin’s international students come to WA. The rest study at its 50 per cent-owned campus in Sarawak or study its programs in Singapore, Hong Kong and elsewhere in Malaysia.
UWA has taken a different approach to the market, and in contrast to the rest of the industry, Singapore remains its largest source of international students.
The education sector would welcome changes in both state and federal government policies to foster its growth. In the federal sphere, there is concern about the intensive regulation of the industry.
There is also concern about current immigration department policies, which make it easier for international students to migrate to Australia if they move to a “regional” area, including Adelaide.
UWA’s Bruce McIntosh said this made it particularly hard for WA universities to attract Indian students, many of whom are seeking to settle in Australia.
At a state level, Education and Training Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich seems to have heard the industry’s call for a more strategic whole-of-government approach.
Ms Ravlich said WA’s universities had been working hard to attract overseas students, “but I feel we can do better”.
“That is why I have just started the process of putting together a more co-ordinated and strategic approach to help make all of WA’s universities more appealing to overseas students,” she said.
The state government’s policy response has included extra funding of $3.8 million over three years for Perth Education City, which is a consortium of 30 universities, schools and colleges.
Mr Ryan said 70 per cent of PEC’s spending would be on “genuine destination marketing of Perth”, which was designed to make international students aware of Perth as an option.
He noted that states such as Queensland had big tourism promotion budgets, which helped educational institutions attract students.
About half of all international students went to a city they had visited previously, or where they had relatives or friends living, Mr Ryan said.
PEC planned to work together with the WA tourism commission in defined markets, including eastern China, South Korea and parts of Europe, so their combined spending had more impact, he said.
PEC also works jointly with its members, particularly in markets like Kenya, Zambia, eastern China and Thailand, where WA does not have a strong profile.
“We can be helpful in markets where Perth is not well known and members need to work together collaboratively,” Mr Ryan said.
The collaborative marketing includes bringing “key gatekeepers” to Perth.
For instance, seven education agents account for 90 per cent of Indian students coming to Australia, so PEC, with extra funding from its members, brought three of those agents to Perth last year.
Mr Ryan said the agents, who had never been to Perth, were introduced to both WA’s educational institutions and its lifestyle attractions.
“These are the very real ways that we are changing perceptions of Perth,” he said
PEC chairman John Wood believes extra promotional funding for the sector is money well spent as it will boost tourism and jobs.
“For example, a 10 per cent increase in international student enrolments earns the WA economy more than $100 million extra annually and more than 450 jobs,” Professor Wood said.
Within the overall international education market, higher education is the largest component, accounting for about half of all students and a majority of spending.
A further 20 per cent of students are enrolled in vocational education courses, through colleges such as Curtin International College, Perth Institute of Business and Technology, Murdoch Institute of Technology and TAFE colleges.
English language schools, which mainly provide short courses for people on tourist visas or working holiday visas, account for another 20 per cent of the market.
The big players in this segment include the Australian College of English, Phoenix English Language Academy and Milner International College of English.
The balance is mostly made up of international students at secondary schools including Murdoch College and Taylors College.
