Education and immigration

Kate's sister Althea came over for dinner last night and we got talking about the master's degree in public health she's working on. She's got an exam next week so naturally enough I asked if she was nervous.

"Oh, no, not really," she says. "You get a pretty good idea of what's going to come up. They've taken us through the past eight years of exam papers and shown us the answers. They want as many people to pass as possible."

She then started telling me about an ex who left the University of New South Wales because he was basically ordered to pass a higher percentage of his students.

This is no doubt related to the fact that
Australia's second largest export industry after mining is education. Thousands of students from emerging Asian economies pass through Australia's universities each year, bringing in handsome revenues and, after a few years, usually ending up with permanent residency status and ultimately citizenship.

I don't particularly have a problem with any of this but it's a strikingly perverse way to go about things. Tertiary education is being used as a backdoor immigration route to make up for the fact that the paths to legitimate migration are severely obstructed by xenophobic laws.

That means that universities can jack up their course fees for overseas students, dragging domestic fees up in their wake. Because universities have to keep the money rolling in, grading gets more generous because no one wants the cash cows to flunk out.

The result is that domestic students are paying more and more for crappier education, while overseas students are mostly putting in the bare minimum to stay on their courses, while flogging themselves in their free time driving taxis and washing dishes to pay some of their course fees.

On paper, the education sector is thriving because there's lots of export revenues coming in, but in practice Australian universities continue to punch well below their weight in global terms and the push for fees before prestige isn't helping.

The first thing a sane Australia would do on migration would be to stop wasting money on inhumane detention centres, lift the cap on refugee intake, and get over its weird paranoia about boat people. (I have a pet theory that boat arrivals are feared so much, compared to the majority of refugees who arrive with a plane ticket, because the sight of boats bringing in immigrants makes modern white Australians feel unnervingly like Aboriginal people circa 1788..."look how that turned out for the locals" being the unconscious subtext.)

But the second thing Australia should do is remove these perverse incentives that are damaging the country's universities, themselves a crucial long-term national asset. At present, wannabe migrants essentially pay a A$20,000ish 'fee' in course costs, plus several years of living costs and work in Australia, in return for this backdoor migration.

Why not just set that fee officially? Open the doors and say that anyone, subject to the usual personal background checks, can migrate if they pay the money? Make the fee higher if you want, and spend it on resettlement services for at-risk refugees. Better still, advertise it widely in countries where people routinely fall into the hands of paid people smugglers, and cut the snakeheads out of the business.

The right of residency in Australia is clearly highly prized around the world, and the sort of people who go to these lengths to get to this country would likely make great contributions to society and the economy down the track. We should be selling them what they want, not this shabby under-the-counter migration policy.