International Student Policy in Australia

Australia’s higher education sector was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Student and staff numbers declined, and the government assistance afforded to other sectors was all but missing for universities. In a callous example of abandonment in an hour of need, Australia’s international students were similarly ignored by the federal government.

International Student Policy in Australia: The welfare dimension tells the story of how successive governments have chosen a conscious form of what is effectively policy inaction on international student welfare since well before COVID-19.

The politics of policy during the pandemic is a significant part of the narrative, but it only tells part of the story. International Student Policy in Australia examines the policies and laws that regulate the lives of international students in Australia. Professor Gaby Ramia examines the political, policy, governance and regulatory contexts within which international student rights and welfare are determined in Australia and interrogates specific thematic areas – including racism, discrimination and violence, health and wellbeing – and the means by which students have dealt with crisis situations over the past 20 years.

International Student Policy in Australia: The welfare dimension provides an analysis of international student welfare amid questions of policy action and inaction in the management of multiple crises, within an era of massified international education, drawing implications for policy and legal reform and providing a revised policy agenda for a post-pandemic future.

Gaby Ramia is Professor of Policy and Society at The University of Sydney, where he is Deputy Head of School (Research) in the School of Social and Political Sciences, and a Theme Co-Leader in the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies.

• Preface
• Acknowledgements

1. Introduction
2. International student policy
3. Australia in a global market
4. Legal regulation
5. Welfare and policy inaction
6. Crises in welfare
7. Conclusion

• Bibliography
• Index

“Gaby Ramia’s well researched book can be recommended to anyone interested in more deeply understanding the stresses that international students have been experiencing in Australian universities.”

– Journal of Australian Political Economy 94: 147-8.

 

“There is no good reason why international students should not be treated as well as citizen students, especially given the vast sums that each pays for their education. Gaby Ramia, Australia’s foremost expert on the governance of international education, points the way to a more humanist education and a more globally responsible policy.”

– Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, UK

 

Format: paperback
Size: 210 × 148 mm
178 pages
16 figures, 4 b&w tables, bibliographies, and indexes
Copyright: © 2024
ISBN: 9781743329795
Publication: 01 Oct 2024
Series: Public and Social Policy Series