Excelling at education exports
The future
Gould’s view is that Asia will be the biggest consumer of Australian education, which is why he’s dedicated to the region. But we’ll engage differently, he says: “We automatically think about Asian students coming here, but the opportunity for learning and development organisations is the other way: going to those countries and building capacity from within.”
For Prestipino, being able to sustain quality and value will lead to further success. This will become more important as globalisation takes hold. “Particularly in the services industry there’s a screaming demand for individuals to have a lot more global savvy in the way they work and manage,” he says, adding that institutions like ICMS will meet demand.
Chicharo believes that not only will the sector grow, “those people that are getting into it for the wrong reasons are not going to have a happy time”.
He concludes: “There’ll always be a need for people to be educated overseas and it’s an area that’s going to evolve in terms of how you set up your partnerships. Some models will survive better than others. It’s an exciting sector to be in.”
CASE STUDY: Visiting Researcher Program
Educational marketing is no longer about waving brochures, according to Flemming Larsen, Austrade’s trade commissioner for Scandinavia and coordinating officer for Australian Education International.
Larsen is the architect of the new Visiting Researcher Program running throughout Europe. “I was looking at how we could link education with other government investments like cleantech,” he explains of the program’s genesis.
“I thought, ‘why don’t we invite researchers from Australia in the cleantech sector to come to Europe and link up with counterparts?’ The visiting professor would be in front of hundreds of students at a university faculty.”
This serves two key purposes: it captures the interest of European students, and it allows Australia to “move up the value chain in our proposition as a study destination”.
“Students see the link their university already has with the university in Australia. That’s going to be the pulling effect for the undergraduates to consider Australia,” says Larsen.
The program has other benefits besides marketing. If the research has a commercial aspect, the researcher has the opportunity to meet with industry on the tour.
Further to that, Larsen notes there’s much Australia can teach Europe. “They could not see how a university could be commercial, so maybe we have another thing to teach the universities that are a little more progressive, moving their research into commercialisation,” he says.
The program presents a significant logistical challenge, not only in moving the researcher around the continent, but juggling calendars. Add the fact that Austrade had a flood of applicants for the program, and it is also about managing candidates.
With more money there would be more visits, and to other regions, says Larsen, and the program could also work for sectors outside cleantech. For the meantime, they’ll track the effect of the visits.
“The ultimate measure is to see what level of cooperation will exist between the universities,” he says. “I want to see the student visa statistics grow, and I want higher education students: postgraduate and PhD students.”
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