All fair enough, but to give blame where it’s due, it was John Dawkins as education minister in the Hawke government who really got this ball rolling. Under his regime the main purpose of higher education appeared to be solving the balance of payments problem. And it was he who dissolved the distinction between education,and vocational training, to the detriment of both.

And if you want students to understand “other ” perspectives and gain a benefit from international contact, then it is teaching and the teachers that need to provide this perspective. After all, that is their job. There isn’t much you can or should learn from a fellow student. Except what they say in seminars or tutorials. Not studying alongside them copying their notes.
This is a lazy argument and analysis.

Yet you say pursuing international students is based on fuelling a culture based on profit, competition and revenue and then in the next breath say there isn’t a problem with international students. That it is everything other than that. I don’t get it. Either international students are part of the problem or they are not. You are including them in the things that are wrong and in this you are correct. Unis and governments love them. But you can’t separate their desire to study here at great expense, making them a desirable commodity as opposed to the poor local student who must feel like a leper at times, from their presence being here and crowding out local students on the basis that they are willing to pay lots of money.

It would be great to offer these things and be nice but there just aren’t the resources at the moment.

With appropriate numbers of educators, too.

That assumes that the universities were run as educational institutions and were staffed by appropriately renumerated educators.

One would add that the descriptor ‘commodification’ concurs with the litertaur eof the ’80s in early years of fee paying ‘foreign students’ described as an ‘export commodity’; same nowadays describing temporary resident students as ‘immigrants’ and population numbers under the NOM that disppears their individuality or agency.

Related to university or broader higher education sector, is internal hiearchy, authority and application of Frederick Taylor’s top down ‘Scientific Management’ (used by Henry Ford et al.) for an assembly line, measuring inputs, outputs and personnel performance. Latter in academic can be tied to research articles published, but for teaching it’s ‘pass rates’ that encouarges ambitious academics to mimic the commercial management culture.

Finally, the author is a member of the NTEU, and like other unions and sectors, they could do more outreach to sessionals etc. (esp. private higher ed & regional satellites) who are treated as ‘robots’, but any whiff of union connections may be enought for a temporary contract, not to be reenwed for the next session…..