A Defence of Australian Education: To DFAIT and Ghur

A Defence of Australian Education: To DFAIT and Ghur

Looking for an international business research and teaching position where my training and experience will make a positive impact on the organization policy needs and its students. Your advertised opportunity was found by tracing your authorship of Best Practices on Managing the Delivery of Canadian Education Marketing.

Daniel J. Costello                                                                                                                                                                              35 George Street, New Minas, Nova Scotia, B4N-4E2, Canada                                                                                        Tel: 1-902-681-0504 Skype: costello.daniel 
Email: costello_daniel@yahoo.com

January 27, 2013

Dr. Daniel J. Guhr                                                                                                                                                          San Francisco Bay Area Office                                                                                                                                              P.O. Box 262 San Carlos, CA 94070 USA  

                                                                             

Looking for an international business research and teaching position where my training and experience will make a positive impact on the organization policy needs and its students. Your advertised opportunity was found by tracing your authorship of Best Practices on Managing the Delivery of Canadian Education Marketing.

Allow me to submit a brief review of your analysis regarding the Hollowed Out Quality of Australian Education as perceived by your report and presented to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Canada and by extension the academic community in this nation which consistently rejects the notion that there is anything to be learned or applied in digging a little deeper in the dry.

Of mixed pedigree, a Canadian applicant for your policy analyst position advertises the swag of a hollowed out Australian graduate education. Even a rooster puffs itself up as big as it can.

Yes, funding cuts made more than forty years ago propelled the establishment of IDP and a federal international marketing alignment was born out of necessity; the Canadian government published their first policy paper on that topic just last year, or forty years late. These are the same determining factors at present in Canada’s educational internationalization scheme, consistent cutbacks and declining HDR enrollments are familiar driving factors. Unless addressed, Canada may see a similar threat in decline of GDP due to rising rates of research investment and intensity in IP and new patents from other proportionally higher invested research competitor OECD nations.

How Australia’s clear blueprint to follow could be seen as a negative approach to financing and a small tax base in population or as a poor solution for Australia, but a good one for Canada is uncharitable. While realizing your report was published in 2009, Australia’s institutional research aims and accomplishments, despite consistent cutbacks, are noteworthy for their growth in research commercialization planning and clearer accountability measures even in the past five years; similar transparency issues in taxpayer financed research in Canada has yet to be addressed. The hollowed out quality foundation of which you write is now measured and monitored by The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) and while acrimonious in application and contentions, it is an independent body as opposed to Canada’s own AUCC quality assessment of itself which could be perceived as an effort to avoid the conflict of interest which that reveals. Only one of Canada’s provinces is monitoring its higher education on behalf of international students surely based on nefarious recruitment campaigns which only harm Canada’s international educational brand.

The financial difficulties of Australia’s institutions are apparent in the past four years, amounting to the growth declines you presented however several racially motivated attacks on foreign students carry some of the blow-back  a rapid 71% decline in Indian students enrollment following the murder of one of their classmates in Sydney was an opportunity for Canada to pick up a concurrent increase in Indian enrollments itself with a well-timed marketing campaign which never took place.  It is also difficult to assume that declines in enrollments are based upon quality issues when it is seen that the UK is facing similar declines due to tightened visa requirements and the US is enjoying increased enrollments based upon price cutting measures such as delivering university programming through high school extension services.

Yet, Australia’s firm footholds in Asia are based upon forty years of relationship building; the success of these markets provide tangible and positive social capital impacts upon the growth in business and IT research and evidence of the quality of education delivered. Progressive steps to offshore branch campus developments in several of those nations somewhat anticipates future declines in international enrollments in Australia. The growth in local competitors abroad which Australia largely helped to train and teach will squeeze resources at home in the estimated 30% declines in domestic student enrollments predicted not only for Australia but Canada as well over the next decade; a commitment to doubling of international students in Canada by 2022 according to a recent DFAIT report on commercialization will hardly meet domestic enrollment declines. In short, it appears to me that Australia has utilized its scant resources to the best of its capacity while Canada’s institutions have yet to do so and have displayed an elegant example of agency theory without greater revelation of forever missed past and future opportunities to support research which maintains and ensures Canada’s quality of life.

Relocation ready; available immediately.

Sincerely,

Dan Costello