The “spark” that brought Canadian higher education to its knees offers insights into how to defend the sector, an Australian conference has heard.
Universities Canada chief executive Gabriel Miller said his country’s “panicked” and “ham-fisted” treatment of international students had a silver lining. “There are some very strong similarities between what’s happening in higher education right now and what’s happening in the housing market,” he told the Universities Australia Solutions Summit.
Housing and higher education are both “vehicles for opportunity”, Miller explained. “They’re symbols of people’s ambitions and…what they hope for their families. If those doors get closed, it can become a very potent political issue very quickly. Part of our challenge is to channel into that before we…reach disaster point.”
Miller said his country’s longstanding housing problems had not been considered a “political crisis” before 2023. “Eighteen months ago…Canada’s prime minister was saying housing is not a federal responsibility. Six months later, he was rewriting his immigration policy to deal with it. The point is, something that is a problem for people can crystallise and suddenly mobilise political action.”
He said that while foreign student admissions had been?capped around a third lower than previous enrolments, international education advocates had quickly realised “we weren’t going to hit those caps…because the rest of the world somehow got the message we weren’t interested in attracting international students”.
While there had been “abuses” in Canadian international education, the numbers of incoming PhD students had now fallen by one-fifth and master’s students by almost one-third. “Those are not the people we wanted to lose. When you decide you’re going to start being more selective in who you recruit, it really matters who you recruit.”
Universities UK chief executive Vivienne Stern said such undercurrents were part of “an inevitable cycle that you never win. You have periods in which there’s liberalisation and periods in which there is tightening up.”
Stern said the sector must aspire to “some kind of stability which allows government to manage the pressures that they face politically”.
“Politicians have been unseated by migration as a political issue. However liberal their instincts, I think there is a deep fear about what…losing the argument on migration means electorally. If we don’t understand that those pressures are quite real, then we won’t make any headway.”
Murdoch University vice-chancellor Andrew Deeks said the higher education sector’s “loss of social licence” was a phenomenon of Western democracies. “Within Japan, and indeed within many of the eastern countries, there is no loss of trust in institutions,” said Deeks, who is also president of the International Association of Universities.
“Within the broader Global South there is a desperate desire to get into universities, to get a university degree, with all the social mobility that that implies. The universities are still highly respected.”
Deeks said social licence issues had “distracted” Western democratic governments from the economic spin-offs from higher education, just as the rest of the world underwent an “acceleration” in research productivity by spending more on higher education and clawing their way up the university rankings.
He said the research productivity of Western democracies had “stagnated” while it was “accelerating dramatically” elsewhere, partly because artificial intelligence was helping scientists from non-English-speaking countries produce papers that journals would previously have rejected “because the reviewers didn’t understand the scientific content”.
