Friday 17 January 2014

The market for foreign students

Australia likes to sell its education services to other countries. The fees they pay help to cover the costs of staff salaries, fund new facilities and research. For Australia the fees represent exports and so help maintain the external balance.

In recent years there has been a sharp drop in the number of foreign students attending Australian Universities and in 2011 this caused Monash to reduce staffing by 400 posts.

Now things are improving with a rise in applications for student visa's. There are a number of factors that have caused this, and The Guardian article gives most of them and backs them up with some useful data.

For Year 12 students this would be a good exercise in applying supply and demand analysis, Year 11 students will need to wait a little but can come back to it in around week 6. Year 12 students can also ponder if there is sufficient information in the article to apply any concepts of elasticity of demand to the situation.

I will say no more for now, but will return to this article in a few weeks to provide some analysis.

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