A critical policy analysis of the Australian Strategy for International Education 2021–2030

Abstract

National internationalization strategies are produced by governments to frame and drive their internationalization agendas. They are relatively new, but growing in number. This paper contributes to an emerging strand of international education research: that of discursive policy analysis. We analyse the Australian Strategy for International Education (ASIE) 2021–2030, drawing on Bacchi and Goodwin’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ framework and ask what ‘problems’ are discursively constructed by the ASIE, what assumptions underlie these representations, and how the representations have come about. Our analysis reveals that deeply rooted assumptions govern the strategy in relation to six key themes: marketisation, sustainability, domestic labour, national security, international student wellbeing and international student identity. We demonstrate that the commercial orientation of the ASIE is historically contingent and precludes alternative ways of imagining international education.

Introduction

Government-driven internationalization strategies are an emergent genre in international education (De Wit et al., 2020). Because these strategies are authored by national governments, they are, in Foucault (1991) sense of the term, proclamations of governmentality – that is, they lay down the ‘governance mentality’ that national authorities deem appropriate and desirable for the conduct of international education within their ambit. These documents typically address two populations: on the one hand, the citizens of the state, to whom benefits flow from hosting international students, and on the other, the ambiguous cohort of ‘guest citizens’ (international students) whose presence is actively sought by the state but whose status within it remains limited, provisional and transitory.

Knight (2015: 337) has commented on the widespread confusion about the meaning of internationalization, but also suggests that national policy statements signal a shift away from internationalization as an ‘ad hoc or marginalised part of the education landscape’. According to Crăciun (2018), only 11% of countries have an official internationalization strategy, most of which were produced in the last decade. Of the three countries with the highest percentage of international students undertaking higher education (Project Atlas, 2020), the United Kingdom has produced three strategies (2003, 2013, 2019/21 ¹ ), while Canada (2014, 2019) and Australia (2016, 2021) have produced two each. There are clear similarities between the (most recent) strategies of these three countries, in that they all ‘value’ international education for the economic benefits it brings to their respective countries, and they are underpinned by a neoliberal discourse of competition that views other nations as threats to market share. They all view international students as a solution to domestic labour shortages and/or as agents of soft power diplomacy. The need to diversify the source countries of international students away from China and India is also common. There are points of difference, too. The UK is unique in needing to acknowledge Brexit while portraying itself as an open, internationalized nation. It also leans on the brand recognition of its ancient institutions. Canada uniquely foregrounds the imperative for domestic students to travel and study abroad.

Our focus is the Australian government’s Australian Strategy for International Education 2021–2030: Connected, Creative and Caring Education (‘ASIE’ hereafter), launched in November 2021 by the Department of Education (Australian Government, 2021). It replaced the National Strategy for International Education 2025, which was Australia’s first national strategy launched in 2016 and promoted as a 10-year plan, but which was paused in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Australia has particular significance as the country with the highest percentage of international students in its higher education system (Project Atlas, 2020), and the loss of students in the pandemic exposed a number of underlying issues. The economic impact both on higher education institutions (through loss of direct revenue) and on the broader national economy (through loss of indirect economic activity and a decreased labour force) was starkly felt. Moreover, as diplomatic tensions rose between Australia and China through this period, the reliance on recruiting students from a geopolitical adversary heightened the sense of crisis around international education. In 2019, 27.3% of all international students in Australia came from China (Department of Education, 2024).

Close reading of national strategies constitutes an important advancement in internationalization research. Qualitative discourse analysis allows latent assumptions, historical contingencies and discursive framings to be exposed, and their material impacts understood. Due to the novelty of these governmental policy outputs, research of this nature is nascent, but our analysis complements that of Lomer (2014, 2017, 2018) in the UK. Using the tools of critical policy analysis, we explore the five ‘problems’ discursively constructed in the ASIE, the underlying presuppositions, and how these have come about.

Theoretical approach

In explicating his concept of governmentality, Foucault (1991: 92) reminds us of the origin of the term within political economy:

To govern a state [means] to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods.

National internationalization strategies exemplify political economy in this sense. A country’s Department of Education is what Foucault (2002: 46) would term the ‘authority of delimitation’ – the authority that takes international education as its object and delimits it, names its various aspects, and designates how it ought to be judged and valued. This flows into institutions and classrooms, setting parameters for education before any teaching begins. Indeed, Crăciun (2018) argues that the complex debate around the meaning of ‘internationalization’ (Hunter et al., 2022) is (to some extent) demystified by what national governments claim to do in their internationalization policies and plans. A national internationalization strategy represents not only a strategic focus but also a closing off of the potential discourse around it. Internationalization could be many things, but a national strategy delimits the discursive frames through which it can be viewed, understood and practiced.

A poststructuralist approach to policy makes room for the fluctuating and dynamic nature of social realities. Rather than ascribing fixed meanings to phenomena, poststructuralists attempt to understand meanings made in situ, always in relation to forms of power. Foucault (1979) invokes the ‘micro-physics of power’ to capture how macro forces – such as state and judicial power – manifest in grounded and specific ways insofar as individuals experience and are governed by them. Here, power and knowledge are in an inextricable relationship:

[…] power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. (Foucault, 1979: 27)

To ‘know about’ (or claim to have knowledge of) a problem is within the same discursive ambit as constructing something as a problem. This is not to assert that the process is unreasonable or obvious to those affected by the policy in question; rather, that policy legitimates itself through the active construction of that which it claims to govern. Analysing policy discourse is a process of denaturalising the links between elements, and enquiring into how these links were made and how they are maintained.

Methodology

We draw on the framework for critical policy analysis offered by Bacchi and Goodwin (2016), referred to as ‘What’s the problem represented to be’? (WPR). This approach

considers how governmental practices, understood broadly, produce “problems” as particular kinds of problems […] What exactly is produced? How is it produced? And, with what effects? An underlying goal is to make the politics involved in these productive practices visible. (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016: 14)

Bacchi and Goodwin (2016: 16) state that the ‘intent and purpose’ of this approach is to challenge a view of policy as something which is simply mapped onto already existing problems. Instead, WPR ‘makes the case that policies do not address problems that exist; rather, they produce ‘problems’ which they then address. This stance counters the assumption that policy sits on top of an already created social reality; rather, the policy analyst’s task is to understand how things have come to be and how they are maintained in such a way.

To guide the deconstruction of policy, Bacchi and Goodwin (2016) propose the following steps, which are paraphrased:

• What’s the problem represented to be in a policy?

• What assumptions underlie this representation of the problem?

• How has this representation of the problem come about? What is left unproblematic or silent in this representation of the problem?

• What effects are produced by this representation of the problem?

• How and where has this representation been produced, and how could it be disrupted?

In order to construct our findings, we conducted a deductive thematic analysis of the ASIE using the WPR approach as a guide. We employed qualitative, reflexive thematic analysis, following the steps discussed by Braun and Clarke (2021). We began by familiarising ourselves with the ASIE, coded the content in line with the WPR guiding questions, generated and refined themes, and wrote them into the following findings and discussion. We present and discuss our analysis in three parts: (1) the problems discursively constructed in the policy, (2) the assumptions underlying these and (3) how they came about.

Analysis and discussion

Question 1: What ‘problems’ are discursively constructed in the policy?

What ‘problems’ are discursively constructed in the policy?

We begin by examining the strategy’s problem representations. To do this, we pinpoint sections in the document that explicitly refer to, or justify, the need to produce the strategy. Working backwards from these produces a picture of how international education is conceptualised by the government. We identify five key problems articulated by the ASIE:

(1) The Australian international education sector was hard hit by the COVID pandemic.

(2) The pandemic exposed deficiencies in Australian international education, including:

(a) A lack of diversity in the international student cohort, creating financial risk.

(b) A failure to embrace new modes of delivery, both online and offshore.

(3) Australia’s workforce skills needs are not aligned with the courses international students take.

(4) International collaborative research should be commercially oriented and secure against foreign interference.

(5) Social cohesion, social isolation, discrimination and exploitation impact international students.

The ASIE posits a need to diversify to make the sector more ‘sustainable’ and to stimulate growth. For context, 72% of international students in Australian universities came from only five countries (predominantly China and India) in 2020, up from 60% in 2010. However, international education is not a free, deregulated market; the government establishes for itself a regulatory role to ensure sustainability: ‘The government will work with the sector, particularly public institutions, on strategies to encourage an optimal make-up of international student cohorts’ (ASIE: 01).

Sector recovery and growth are bolstered by an array of complementary problems (3–5 above). The ASIE states that ‘the importance of international education goes beyond its economic benefits. It facilitates meaningful cross-cultural exchanges, creates influential alumni networks and provides residency pathways for highly skilled graduates’ (ASIE: 02). Shortages in ‘priority employment fields’ (ASIE: 11), such as engineering, technology and health, are aligned with international graduates that can fill them. The claim is made that ‘[m]ore can be done to translate and commercialise Australia’s quality research into new products and innovations’ (ASIE: 13), while guarding against malevolent foreign actors. Education is associated with interconnectedness and soft power (see also Lomer, 2017), which ‘builds meaningful people-to-people links and supports Australia’s position in our region’ (ASIE: 02). There are also concerns, heightened during the COVID pandemic, about the level of connectedness between international students and the local community.

In what follows, we consider the assumptions that underlie these problem representations. We identify six in total, which serve to naturalise and legitimate the problems established by the ASIE. The six key assumptions are concerned with marketisation, sustainability, domestic labour, national security, international student wellbeing and international student identity.

Question 2: What presuppositions or assumptions underlie these problem representations?

Assumption 1: Education is a market

The ASIE’s opening sentence, in the Education Minister’s Foreword, is that ‘International education is one of Australia’s great success stories’ (ASIE: 01). This begs the question: What assumptions underlie this notion of ‘success’? Perhaps cognizant of Australia’s reputation for prioritizing the commercial imperative in international education, financial windfalls are not foregrounded in the Minister’s opening paragraph. Instead, success is defined by the number of students educated and the influence they wield:

We have educated more than three million international students in the past 20 years. These graduates have gone on to lead and shape politics, businesses and societies across the globe. Many have become citizens making an important contribution to Australia. (ASIE: 01)

It is not until the end of his second paragraph that the Minister states how much international education ‘contributes to the national economy […] earning $40.3 billion ² and supporting around 250,000 Australian jobs in 2019, prior to the pandemic’ (ASIE: 01). Similarly, in the Introduction that follows the Foreword, there is awareness that the monetary benefits of international education cannot be seen as the government’s main driver: ‘the importance of international education goes beyond its economic benefits’ (ASIE: 02).

This marks a shift in emphasis from Australia’s first strategy, released in 2016, which overtly foregrounded the economic benefits of international education. In that document, the Minister’s Foreword began:

The development of Australia’s first National Strategy for International Education 2025 highlights the importance of international education to Australia. Recognised as one of the five super growth sectors contributing to Australia’s transition from a resources-based to a modern services economy, international education offers an unprecedented opportunity for Australia to capitalise on increasing global demand for education services. (Australian Government, 2016: V)

While the emphasis shifts from commercialisation (first strategy) to a humanist perspective (second strategy), when taken as a whole, the drive to marketize education still permeates the ASIE as its fundamental assumption. If education is not a right for non-citizens, it can be viewed as an entrepreneurial service for commodification and purchasing – less a ‘public good’ than an ‘internationally tradable service’ offered to fee-paying customers under the General Agreement on Trades and Services (Knight, 2015). Like Australia’s lucrative mining industry, it is a core ‘sector’ of the economy and a mechanism for growing gross domestic product, which fights for market share against competitor countries. This also includes research:

More can be done to translate and commercialise Australia’s quality research into new products and innovations. […] To fully realise the economic and strategic benefits of international research collaboration, Australia needs to grow research engagement with industry partners globally. (ASIE: 13)

The problematization of international education as ‘hard hit’ primarily referenced the number of fee-paying enrolments, which created the need for ‘a new Strategy for the post-COVID world [that] will support the sector to recover and grow sustainably’ (ASIE: 03). We explore the assumptions underlying the notion of sustainability in the next section.

Assumption 2: International education faces a sustainability crisis

As a product of the COVID-19 crisis, the ASIE repeatedly makes the statement that ‘[w]e need to do things differently as we rebuild to make the sector more sustainable’ (ASIE: 01). While sustainability is never defined, it clearly refers to the sustainability of the economic model of international education in Australia (as mentioned, this is valued at $40.3 billion in the Minister’s Foreword).

What is not said is that recovery and sustainability are relative concepts – that is, relative to the numbers of fee-paying students attained in the years before the pandemic. The year 2019 saw an all-time record for international students in Australia: 752,787 (Australian Trade and Investment Commission, 2023). The pandemic-induced drop from 2019 to 2021, in which ‘only’ 571,601 students were in Australia, was significant; however, as recently as 2015, the number was 495,179, which was the highest number of international students in Australian history at that time. University revenue derived from international student fees from 2014 to 19 almost doubled in real terms, rising from $5.2 billion to $10.1 billion (Hurley et al., 2021). In 2019, Australian universities also enjoyed the world’s highest percentage of international students as a proportion of the overall student cohort. At nearly one-third (31.3%), the figure was far higher than Canada (23.7%) and the UK (22.3%), the only other countries exceeding 20% (Project Atlas, 2020). COVID-19 posed no threat to large numbers of international students coming to Australia; it only threatened the sustainability of record numbers of fee-paying students – or, to put it another way, to the sustainability of budget models that assume historically high and continually increasing revenue levels from this source.

Assumption 3: International education is a solution to domestic workforce shortages

‘Meeting Australia’s skills needs’ (ASIE: 03) is a key pillar of the ASIE. The strategy takes for granted that international education is an activity in the national interest. In addition to the money they inject into the domestic economy, international students are valued for the gaps they fill in the Australian labour force:

International students have always been an important source of labour for Australia, both while they are studying and through post-study work rights, as well as becoming entrepreneurs and employers themselves. A stronger alignment between Australian skills needs and courses in which international students enrol will support our businesses, industries and economy. (ASIE: 11)

It is even stated that ‘Australia can further target international research students in key fields and disciplines to align more closely with Australia’s economic priorities and skilled workforce needs’ (ASIE: 13, our emphasis).

Several issues are ignored by this framing of the labour market. Firstly, the source countries themselves have skills needs, but there is no acknowledgement of the brain drain (Bhandari, 2019; Knight, 2015) that results from attracting students to study in Australia and incentivising them to stay longer by ‘permanently increas [ing] the length of temporary graduate visas’ (ASIE: 21). The opportunities for ‘brain gain’ afforded by digital and offshore education are acknowledged: new delivery models can ‘meet skills needs and education ambitions in partner countries’ (ASIE: 08). However, the gains for Australia come through as the overriding motivation for online/offshore delivery. Secondly, graduates seeking a migration outcome can end up in a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ while toiling on post-graduation working visas without gaining permanent residency. These graduates are often stuck in jobs not befitting their qualifications and are subject to workplace exploitation due to the power imbalance of their situation (Australian Government, 2023). Thirdly, not all economic drivers of the hidden migration agenda are spelt out. Two issues related to Australia’s ageing population are left unsaid. One is that more young migrants means more taxpayers who can offset the growing number of non-working (i.e. non-taxpaying) citizens. Another is that ageing citizens require support workers to take care of them – and this labour force requires immigration.

The focus on ‘skills’ also assumes that higher education’s purpose is primarily one of producing job-ready graduates. While this is one purpose, it is not the only purpose; indeed, Australia’s Higher Education Support Act (2003) states that the ‘distinctive purposes’ of universities are threefold:

(i) the education of persons, enabling them to take a leadership role in the intellectual, cultural, economic and social development of their communities; and

(ii) the creation and advancement of knowledge; and

(iii) the application of knowledge and discoveries to the betterment of communities in Australia and internationally

What these purpose statements make clear is that skills development ought to be oriented to community development domestically and internationally, and that ‘the creation and advancement of knowledge’ for its own sake should be a key element of any university’s mission. When it was first established, Australian higher education followed a ‘British-inspired liberal arts model […] tempered by pragmatic concerns’ (Doidge and Doyle, 2022: 668) and emphasising public outcomes as a necessary return on public investments. However, this was subject to significant ideological shifts during the twentieth century. It was during the 1980s particularly that expansionist agendas dovetailed with a shift towards conceptualising education as a private good within the knowledge economy: from ‘civic education to a utilitarian emphasis on equipping students with the skills and flexibility needed by ever-changing labour markets’ (Doidge and Doyle, 2022: 669).

A regulatory outcome of the ASIE is that post-study work rights (PSWRs) are manipulated by government to be more attractive in certain fields of study that are associated with skills shortages. This is encouraged in the strategy:

A key challenge is how to incentivise international students to study in areas of skills needs, an issue also being considered by our international education competitors. Better aligning program choices with priority employment fields will deliver more job-ready graduates in the disciplines and regions where they are most needed. (ASIE: 11)

The humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) disciplines, which align less with the job-ready agenda, have been casualties of this development. Extended PSWRs announced by the Australian government in 2023 (Department of Education, 2023) excluded all HASS degrees other than teaching. The combined effect of fewer international enrolments and higher reliance on fee-paying overseas students therefore weakens the case for the continued existence of HASS in Australian universities.

Assumption 4: International education serves Australia’s security interests

While international education is seen as a way of connecting with the world, it can also be viewed as a way of safeguarding a country against the world. Lomer (2017: 583) interprets the UK’s international education strategy as founded on a need to redress Great Britain’s diminishing global relevance:

In the soft power rationale, attracting significant proportions of international students is argued to increase the UK’s influence in global diplomacy, as international graduates of British education are considered to be more knowledgeable and appreciative of ‘‘British values’’. […] I argue that the unsubstantiated assumptions in the soft power rationale reveal that the assumptions of the last century are still in play, representing international higher education and students in an outdated power relation predicated on Cold War politics.

While Australia has never been a global power, the ASIE makes clear that it too views international education through a national security lens. There are two dimensions to this.

The first is the ‘global diplomacy rationale’ (Lomer, 2017: 595), which predicates that geopolitics dictate the gains sought by nation states when international education is played as a soft power game. This in turn presupposes the notion of the ‘ideal international student’, who is positively disposed towards the host country and continues to exert influence on the global stage that is favourable to the education provider. Australia’s position is complex in this regard. On the one hand, it ranks with Japan as the key regional ally of the United States in the Asia-Pacific. On the other hand, China is both Australia’s largest source of international students over the past two decades and the preeminent rival of the United States for influence in the region. Australia therefore relies on both superpowers for different aspects of its security: the United States for defence, and China for its ‘largest services export and fourth largest export sector overall’ (ASIE: 03).

It can be assumed that the strategy’s insistence on market diversification is driven in part by a need to escape this double bind. In the context of China’s ‘belt and road initiative’, and particularly the so-called ‘maritime silk road’ that stretches from Vietnam to Australia’s northern neighbours, the strategic value of international education for regional soft power comes to the fore in the strategy: ‘The Australian Government and the sector will continue to capitalise on the potential of Australia’s alumni networks to promote Australia and advance national interests, especially in the Indo-Pacific’ (ASIE: 17). It can be assumed that there is also an expectation that, by educating Chinese students, a degree of influence or at least improved relations can be achieved over time. As the strategy states, ‘Australian-educated alumni and their families now hold influential positions in academia, government and business throughout the world’ (ASIE: 16). The Australia-China Alumni Association (2022) estimates that ‘there are almost one million alumni of Australian universities, TAFEs and VET colleges living in China at the moment’, including high-ranking and eminent individuals.

The soft power rationale is complemented by a foreign interference rationale. This assumes that education providers – particularly universities – can no longer autonomously manage the research they conduct with overseas partners. The implementation of Guidelines to Counter Foreign Interference in the Australian University Sector is justified on the basis of a need to ‘better protect all Australian university staff and students from risks of foreign interference by providing them with the principles and resources to address and proactively mitigate instances of foreign interference that may arise in their university work and research’ (ASIE: 14). While the exact nature of the threat is not illustrated by case studies or examples – instead described as ‘evolving’ (ASIE: 14) – it is evidently linked to the increased commercialisation and commodification of university research, particularly around ‘sensitive topics’ (ASIE: 14), and the desire of the government to gatekeep the free flow of information (or ‘IP’) on the basis of ‘national interest’.

Assumption 5: International student wellbeing is a distributed responsibility

COVID-19 put a spotlight on international student wellbeing and the assumptions surrounding it. The strategy states that ‘[f]eeling welcomed, valued, and included in Australia is an important part of the student experience’ (ASIE: 15). Belonging, meaningful connection, satisfaction and social cohesion are cited as key elements of a positive student experience, whereas factors deterring from this are discrimination, vulnerability, and poor mental health and wellbeing.

It is possible that the ASIE canvasses these factors so comprehensively because of highly publicised and conflicting assumptions concerning responsibilities for international student care and wellbeing. In April 2020, when asked about international student support during COVID-19 in a press conference, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison minimised the role of the host country and emphasised the responsibility of individual students:

[T]hey're obviously not held here compulsorily. If they're not in a position to be able to support themselves, then there is the alternative for them to return to their home countries. […] [A]s much as it's lovely to have visitors to Australia in good times, at times like this if you're a visitor in this country, it is time […] to make your way home. […] [O]ur focus and our priority is on supporting Australians and Australian residents. (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2020)

The ASIE takes a broader view, positioning international student wellbeing at the interface of individual experience as well as institutional support structures and quality of life – the assumption being that institutions bear a large part of the responsibility to ensure students have positive experiences. According to the ASIE, ‘ensuring student wellbeing is a responsibility of education institutions, including taking all reasonable steps to provide a safe environment on campus and informing students of support services to assist them in adjusting to study and life in Australia’ (ASIE: 18). The ASIE cites the Education Services for Overseas Students Act, 2000 to bolster the emphasis on institutional responsibility. This act provides ‘tuition assurance, and refunds, for overseas students for courses for which they have paid’ and aims to ‘protect and enhance Australia’s reputation for quality education and training services’ (Part 1, Division 1, 4A (a) and (b)).

One of the challenges here is that ensuring positive experiences for all students is extremely multifaceted, ranging from health to acculturation and beyond. The ASIE addresses this via centralising student mental health, seeing the international student population as particularly vulnerable in this respect. This is set against a wider backdrop of concerns for student mental health across domestic and international cohorts, and in multiple countries, even before the COVID pandemic (Baik et al., 2019; Brewer et al., 2019), which characterised ‘the mental well-being of tertiary students [as] a serious public health issue’ (Larcombe et al., 2016: 1084).

Notwithstanding these concerns, the ASIE underscores Australia’s high student satisfaction figures over time. Citing statistics from the Australian government’s annual Student Experience Survey, it is claimed that ‘satisfaction rates have been consistently high over the past decade. Prior to the pandemic, 75% of international students rated the quality of their entire educational experience positively’; even during the pandemic, ‘onshore international students reported a higher degree of satisfaction with their living experience in 2020, with 91% giving a positive rating to their overall living experience in Australia’ (ASIE: 17).

The effect of this is that the extent to which student experience is currently a problem is not clear cut in the ASIE. The backdrop of increasing concerns for student wellbeing globally, intensified by the pandemic, is looming, and is noted in the ASIE at various points, along with the threats of discrimination and social isolation. However, the cited figures of student satisfaction paint a different picture.

What can be assumed is the responsibility of institutions to pull their weight in matters of student experience, to avoid Australian international education being seen as predatory or advertising a study experience that is not delivered. This appears to be a core element of brand Australia, as envisioned in the ASIE: that what is advertised to international students should be delivered, not only in relation to their teaching and learning experiences on campus but also in relation to experiencing Australia more broadly – accommodation, work and social life.

Assumption 6: International student identity is unproblematic

As the final step in our analysis, we interrogate the notion of the ‘international student’. In the ASIE, as elsewhere, it is assumed that this subject position is fully formed and can be taken for granted. Bacchi (2009) suggests that such assumptions are commonly based on binaries where each side is defined as not the other, underscored by an implied hierarchy. ‘International education’ itself rests on the binary of the ‘local’ (the default, or unmarked case) and the ‘international’ (the exotic ‘add on’). This in turn gives rise to the othering of international students, who are not only viewed as distinct from their domestic counterparts but often as ‘lesser’, perhaps due to negative perceptions about their academic and linguistic preparedness (Fenton-Smith and Humphreys, 2017) or the misconception that they take the place of local students (Crace, 2019).

This subject position is so fixed in the ASIE that the potential to conceive of alternatives is obstructed. The strategy is rigid in seeing international students as visiting non-Australians, who come to the country for the host’s strategic advantage. They are the students that ‘Australia attracts […] from over 190 countries’ (ASIE: 02) who ‘make a key contribution to the visitor economy’ (ASIE: 03). Apart from a brief mention of short-term outbound mobility, Australian students are not encouraged or enabled to view themselves as international students.

There are also unmentioned legislative and economic barriers to becoming an international student. According to the Higher Education Support Act, 2003 (498), an ‘overseas student’ is defined as ‘a person who is not an Australian citizen’. This is further qualified in the Australian Government’s (2022) Higher Education Administrative Information for Providers (section 5.2), which states that these students must pay overseas student fees. Harvey and Leask (2020: 197) remind us of the human and material cost of such categorisations in suggesting that international education policy needs to ‘move beyond a binary system of international and domestic students’ and recognise, for example, that there are students from refugee backgrounds who do not fit either category as currently defined and therefore cannot gain access to higher education.

Question 3: How have these problem representations come about?

While space does not allow a full account of historical antecedents that formed these assumptions, it is possible to reflect on recent developments that have hardened Australia’s commitment to the paradigm of commercialisation. Importantly, Australia’s current conceptualisation of international education has not always been the case. As Adams et al. (2011: 108) argue, ‘[s]ixty years ago, there was no concept of international education in Australian universities’. Rather, the shift from public to private, and domestic to international, has been gradual over decades.

The catchphrase ‘aid to trade’ captures Australia’s paradigmatic shift from the 1950s to the present. The launch of the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Development in South and Southeast Asia in 1951 is commonly taken as the starting point. In this program, students from developing countries were sponsored to study in Australia. The beginnings of today’s fee-paying system can be seen in the 1979 ‘Overseas Student Charge’ for non-sponsored (i.e. private) students. Initially described as a ‘visa fee’, it started at 10% of the notional cost of a university place and rose to 55% by 1988 (Pokarier and Ridings, 1998). A Canberra Times newspaper article about the fee from August 1979 illustrates how far the discourse on international education has shifted. The tens of thousands of dollars outlaid by international students on individual degrees are today lauded as a success story, but in 1979 a modest visa fee was decried as racist:

Overseas students’ fees ‘racist’

The Government's plan to charge private overseas students a fee towards their tuition in Australia was described as “racist” yesterday by university student and staff groups.

The Federation of Australian University Staff Associations unanimously opposed the charges at its annual general meeting in Sydney yesterday.

The national president, Dr Peter Darvall, said the new charges outlined in the Budget would only revive the bad associations of the White Australia policy and would promote a “new isolationism” in Australia.

“Most overseas students who study here are certainly not wealthy by our standards”, he said. “By assisting them Australia has been generating enormous goodwill for a comparatively small outlay”.

The 1980s gave rise to the discursive frame of the fee-paying overseas student that is currently entrenched. In 1987, only 5.9% of Australia’s international students were fee-paying, but by 1995, 89.6% were (Duhs and Duhs, 1997). In the decade prior to COVID-19, international student fees were the largest source of revenue growth for Australian universities, peaking at 27.3% of total revenue in 2019, up from 17.5% in 2010 (Ferguson and Spinks, 2021). To cut to more recent times, as Doidge and Doyle (2022: 668) note:

Covid is forcing Australia’s universities to reappraise business models and forecasts that reflect the confidence of thirty years of continuous economic growth. With full-fee paying international student enrolments increasing tenfold between 1994 and 2018, to constitute a quarter of all university students, Australian higher education had become, pre-pandemic, a $30 billion industry.

Over time, governments also became aware of the economic value of international students in terms of their broader impact on the Australian economy. A 2015 Australian Government report examined both the ‘direct’ economic contribution they make (e.g. by paying fees) and the ‘indirect’ contributions (e.g. by stimulating business for firms and companies that supply services to education providers). It was estimated that for every dollar generated through fees, a further $0.21 was generated indirectly for other industries. Taken together, this equated to 1% of GDP and 1.3% of full-time equivalent jobs.

The subjectification of overseas students as economic agents means that those who are not fee-paying have become the marked case. There are still opportunities offered by the Australian Government for international students to study on full scholarships, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Australia Awards Scholarships. These scholarships cover tuition fees, travel, an allowance and a range of benefits, and are offered to ‘people from developing countries, particularly those countries located in the Indo-Pacific region, to undertake full time undergraduate or postgraduate study at participating Australian universities and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions’ (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2022). Australia has offered scholarships since the 1940s at least, the most historically significant of which was the Colombo Plan; subsequently, there have been various iterations focussed on bringing students from Asia Pacific neighbouring countries to study in Australia (Kent, 2018). While Kent (2018) notes that both developed and developing countries invest heavily in scholarship programs, it is more common for scholarships provided by developed countries such as Australia to focus on bringing foreign students into the host country, rather than sending their own citizens abroad.

Conclusion

Marginson (2022) argues that international higher education must be viewed across the local, national and global scales, none of which have permanent primacy, nor operate in isolation: ‘the single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life’ (p. 1390). The ASIE is an example of a national-level government driver in response to global forces, which encounters local-level institutional agendas (including the motivations of academic managers, staff and students) as it is enacted. Our aim in conducting a critical analysis of the ASIE was to ‘denaturalise’ and historicise the latent assumptions on which the strategy rests and the problems it advances, which operate and are promulgated at various levels. We conclude by considering some of the effects and impacts of the ASIE, in line with Bacchi and Goodwin’s (2016) fourth step of critical policy analysis, which poses the question ‘What effects are produced by this representation of the problem?’

The commercial model of international higher education, the ASIE’s primary conceptual logic, is yet to become a universal paradigm, although in time it may become so. There are still contexts in which international and domestic students pay roughly the same fees, such as in France, where education is subsidized by the state for all students. Germany continues to offer tuition-free bachelors and masters programs to students from outside the European Union. However, even when compared to other contexts where international students may pay higher fees than domestic students, Australia is an outlier in terms of how extreme the competition for, and recruitment of, international students has been. It is unlikely that Australia will pull away from this agenda entirely, although the effects of the COVID pandemic – as the ASIE acknowledges – have revealed the dangers of overexposure.

Managing education institutions with a profit-driven mindset impacts processes and practices at all levels, including teaching, research and administration, which are touched on but not explored in depth by the ASIE. Outcomes include the increased focus on student recruitment and retention, a concern for reputation and rankings, and the marketisation of education to as broad an audience as possible (both domestic and international). Naidoo (2016) points to higher education’s ‘competition fetish’ as a threat to academic work, wrapped up in intellectual capital, geopolitics, national governments and the desire for status. As an example, she highlights the negative consequences of research excellence frameworks, such as the downgrading of teaching, the disincentivizing of curious and open research in favour of a production orientation, and the drive to maximise citations as evidence of research impact. The ‘competition fetish’ produces insularity and prevents global cooperation, as universities are driven to focus on priorities determined by national governments.

Higher education institutions now grapple with the outcomes of the competition logic in the race to secure international enrolments. Lo and Hou (2020) point to the tensions that arise when striving to develop ‘world-class’ universities that are attractive to potential students, while balancing the needs of the local sector. Using Taiwan as a case study, the authors argue that ‘the policy initiatives brought about by the pursuit of world-class excellence have changed the environment of universities […] [The] global dimensions of academic impacts and productivity (e.g. publishing in English international academic journals) are favoured, and the local and national dimensions of faculty work (e.g. publishing in indigenous languages) are somewhat ignored and devalued’ (pp. 499-500).

Material impacts on domestic education are hinted at in the ASIE, particularly in reference to diversification and the ‘optimal student mix in classrooms’ (p. 24). In the wake of the ASIE, this issue has gained increasing attention. The federal government’s Australian Universities Accord (2024: 183) states that ‘there has been significant discussion about the size of international student cohorts in Australian universities and the potential for large concentrations to affect international and domestic student experiences’ and warns that the ‘social licence to operate international education can become challenging when large cohorts are concentrated in particular classes’. However, the Accord acknowledges that there is no ‘compelling evidence to suggest that these negative impacts are widespread’ (p. 183). Clearly, this is an issue in need of empirical, rather than anecdotal, evidence.

Online and transnational education ventures are pushed in the strategy, but without reference to the impacts on the academic workforce in terms of delivering programs outside regular hours, potentially travelling overseas for weeks at a time, and attending to both face-to-face and online students in the same courses. There is also a tension in viewing international (and domestic) students as both learners and fee-paying customers. As learners, they are participants in, and contributors to, the diversity and vibrancy of the Australian education system. However, when viewed as prized customers on whom the economic viability of the education system rests, their subject position and that of providers change. Educational institutions become paid service providers, competing with other institutions both nationally and internationally to attract and please customers. Most problematically, the act of failing a student becomes coterminous with providing a negative client experience. Whether this agenda is sustainable into the future – and whether educators and institutions are willing to continue crafting their identities and practices around it – remain to be seen.