Note: This transcript was provied by a third-party servicer.
Mushtaq Gunja: Hello and welcome to dotEDU, the public policy podcast from the American Council on Education. I'm your host, Mushtaq Gunja, along with my co-hosts, the incomparable, the inimitable, Jon Fansmith and Sarah Spreitzer. Jon and Sarah, how are you?
Jon Fansmith: This is the weirdest thing, Mushtaq. As you were saying that intro, I had this thought, if we were the American Council on Higher Education, our acronym would be ACHE. I think that speaks to my frame of mind these days a little bit, that that's what's popping to my head. But I'm doing well otherwise.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sarah, did I say the American Council on Higher Education? It's definitely possible.
Jon Fansmith: You did not. No, no, no, you did not. This was just musings from my brain.
Mushtaq Gunja: Ah, yes.
Sarah Spreitzer: I'm just bitter because you two have been traveling together and obviously you have some sort of shared hive mind at this point.
Jon Fansmith: No, we do not have a shared hive mind. But I will say for people who are interested in the differences between us as hosts to further your campaign of team Mushtaq, team Sarah, team Jon, I will paint a scene that Mushtaq and I were on a plane together last night. And after the plane took off, Mushtaq was in front of me so I could see what he was doing. Mushtaq gets out his laptop does, does, I don't know, work for his law professor job, for his ACE job. He's sipping a glass of water, very responsibly, amiably chatting with the person next to him. And then at some point he just goes and takes a quick power nap, I presume, that keeps him going.
I got a double bourbon, broke out my phone, watched a show, pretty dumb, and waited till we landed, and checked email when I landed. So you can sort of see a different dynamic there between the two of us.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, that's hilarious. But actually what happened was that the plane didn't have Wi-Fi and it almost always does. And so right before the plane took off, they announced that it didn't have Wi-Fi. So I frantically tried to get on Netflix to be able to download the latest episode of ... Oh, now I can't remember.
Sarah Spreitzer: You guys could have talked to each other. You could have done that too.
Mushtaq Gunja: We did a little bit, but we were worried about disturbing the people I think around us, plus the trade secrets from the American Council on Education or Higher Education.
Anyway, friends, we are here today with an amazing interview with Dr. Judyth Sachs, the chief academic officer of Studiosity. And we're here during International Week and there's a really important report that came out this week, the Open Doors Report, which we've been teasing on this podcast feed as the thing that we have been looking forward to be able to get some sense of the data around international students. This is the report that we look at. It came out I think, Sarah, is this right, just a few days ago?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, it was released on Monday, Mushtaq. This is an annual report that's put together by our colleagues over at the Institute for International Education, IIE. It receives funding from the US State Department. It's a backwards look on international student enrollment. It does come out as part of International Student Week. And it looks back at the previous academic year, but they also release a report at the same time, which is a snapshot of what they believe is happening with the current academic year.
And so I guess to start with the Open Doors Report for the 2024, 2025 year, not a big surprise. A lot of the trends that we were seeing continuing, we had slight growth in our international student enrollment. I think it was around 6%. We had basically returned to pre-COVID levels of just around a little over a million international students. And we weren't seeing the big growth that we had seen over the past decade when we really saw a lot of growth, especially from those students coming from China and India.
But I think a lot of people were really watching very closely what was going to be in the snapshot for this academic year because we had seen some survey work done by NAFSA, the Association for International Educators, that was predicting between a 20 to 40% drop in international student enrollment. And really that was due to some of the policies being put forward by the Trump administration, especially around student visas. Some of the actions like revoking student visas for participation in college protests, things like that. And what we see from the snapshot is a 17% drop in new international student enrollment. So there was a 1% drop, I believe in total international student enrollment. And I think Jon is going to talk a bit about that.
But the 17% drop, while it's not as large as I think what groups like NAFSA had been predicting, that's not 17% at every single institution. And so I think what we're seeing is at some institutions, they've experienced no drop, at other institutions, their drop is closer to the 40% number. And so it is impacting institutions in different ways. But looking at that 1% decline overall, that's taking into account new students as well as continuing international students.
Mushtaq Gunja: And so, Sarah, I guess it sort of implies that there's a whole set of international students that are here, have been here, and are both on the undergraduate side and on the graduate side. And I know that some of what is driving this is OPT, or optional practical training. Sarah, Jon, do you want to talk a little bit about what we're seeing both in the undergrad space and then in the grad space as it relates to these statistics?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I think one of the things that is confusing to people when they saw these statistics is you hear a 17% decline in new international students, and that is very clearly a bad outcome. And keep in mind, these are new students that will have tails, right? That will be 17% fewer for each successive year they would have been in this country. If these trends continue, you're going to start to see a much sharper downward turn in the number of international students, stands to reason.
The other thing is that 1% decline, I think people could say, "Well, okay, overall that's not so bad." But what the difference there is just what you were talking about, there was about a 14% increase in the number of OPT students staying in the country, which is a big jump year to year and I think really helps offset some of the losses of new students. That's also not likely to hold. And Sarah, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but that's a pattern that's unlikely to be maintained, especially as we continue to see, which we would expect to see throughout the rest of this administration, declines in the new international students coming into the country.
Sarah Spreitzer: So OPT or optional practical training is a program that's been around for a couple decades now, I think. And it allows the student after graduation or finishing their academic program to actually get practical training at a US employer. It's not a work visa. It allows them to get a work authorization and work, but they're still underneath their student visa. And the program has been questioned before, specifically most recently by the Trump administration's nominee for USCIS, which is the agency within DHS that grants work authorization to students.
And so it was a program that was created through executive authority. It has been tested in the courts before, but it's unclear whether or not the Trump administration is going to continue to support it. And we know from speaking to prospective international students and also students on why they chose to study in the United States, OPT is a big selling factor. And most of our competitor countries, Canada, the UK, Australia, they've created similar programs because they've seen how popular OPT is.
So currently you can get anywhere from a year to up to three years of practical training following your degree. The three years is for the STEM fields and it has to be directly related to your field of study. But it's an important program and it's unclear how long that's going to last.
Mushtaq Gunja: I feel like there are mixed signals at best coming from this administration. Jon, you said a second ago, it's unlikely that the previous increase will hold. It's hard to know exactly what's happening. I watched with some interest President Trump's interview with Laura Ingraham that I think happened last week in which she pushed him on this question of H-1B visas and students from China basically asking the president, why are you allowing any Chinese students to come to this country? And he gave a little bit of a surprising, at least to me, full throated defense at least in the moment of his actions in allowing Chinese students to continue to come and study in the US.
And on the other hand, we've seen other indications from this administration, celebrating the drop in international enrollment, which you just said, Sarah, the head of USCIS. So I don't know, how should we interpret where we are? Are there reasons to be optimistic here or is this really something that is both out of our control and we can't do anything about? What do you guys see?
Sarah Spreitzer: I think that part of it is political messaging. I think President Trump recognizes the incredible economic impact international students have on the US economy. I mean not just on our institutions, but across their housing that they're spending money on, the books that they're buying, the meals that they're eating out. All of that, it's a huge win for the United States.
But when you look at the policy platform that was put forward by Project 2025, they talked of one of the goals of limiting foreign student enrollment. Foreign students make up around 6% of total college enrollment in the United States. It's really not that much, but I think that there's this out-sized view that somehow perhaps they're taking seats away from domestic students, which they're not, or they're somehow taking advantage of the US system.
So while President Trump can talk about support, his policies definitely are not reflecting that. And I was talking to Jon this morning that the White House actually tweeted out kind of a joyful tweet about the fact that international student enrollment had dropped by 17%. And much of the comments on the tweet were like, "Thank you for keeping your promise. Please block all students from China or let's try and get it to zero." So it's clear that that is, I think, reflected in the policy that they're trying to discourage international students.
Jon Fansmith: And I think, Mushtaq, we've seen this. You mentioned the H-1B visas too. There is a very vigorous debate on the right right now about what is the appropriate federal policy towards engagement with the rest of the world. And a lot of supporters of President Trump have supported policies that I think you could term America first or isolationist depending on your perspective, this idea of we should be focusing on Americans.
And certainly around, like Sarah talked about, this idea that an international student is taking a seat from an American student, which as she pointed out is untrue, or the idea that an H-1B visa worker is taking a job from an American employee. And we've talked about this on our podcast, but the $100,000 annual fee, that we see as so incredibly burdensome and crippling to bringing the best talent in the world to work on our campuses, for a lot of people on the right is insufficient. So allowing a pathway for foreign workers to come to this country.
And so the president is in many ways in a really difficult position managing his coalition of supporters because you talk to industry, you talk to the tech sector, you talk to a lot of other people who value the contribution Sarah enumerated, and they see it. They want a strong economy for this country and that in many ways is driven by these engagements. But you also have a domestic base that is incredibly hostile to the concept even of allowing international students or workers to come here and it's just a tough one. So some of this inconsistency you see, I think is probably an administration trying to send different messages to different segments about where their beliefs lie and it's confusing to track.
Sarah Spreitzer: I think it's also you need to look not just at the visa policies, but some of the actions this administration has taken around research funding. Because what we've seen is that other countries, the EU, China, others are recruiting our scientists and our researchers and they're taking those international students that would otherwise be in the labs here in the states and establishing them in other countries. And that's likely going to impact us for several years. Even if we have stable funding next year and do reverse all of the visa policy issues, we're still likely going to be declining.
The other thing that's happening right now separate from the Trump administration's policies is that China used to be our largest center of international students. They always made up about a third. They've dropped to around 23%, and the difference is being made up within India. And so now India is sending around 31% of the total international students to the United States.
Not all of that is being driven by US policy. I think China is making some decisions as they're becoming more competitive with us in the R&D space that they are trying to keep more of their domestic talent. I was recently speaking to an international person from campus who told me that there is a China policy that they are not hiring people for government jobs if you have a degree that you received outside of China. They're really trying to encourage their domestic talent to remain in China. And I think again, that's part of the decision that they're making as they compete with the United States in science and technology.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, Sarah, that's an excellent segue to this wonderful conversation that you and Jon had with Judyth Sachs, again, the chief academic officer at Studiosity. I know that you tackled some of these questions about the challenges that our students face when they are here and the right support that we might need to give to them to be able to have them succeed both when they're on campus and beyond. So really looking forward to hearing that conversation. And we will be right back with Dr. Sachs
Jon Fansmith: And welcome back. As we mentioned at the top, we are joined by Judyth Sachs, who is the chief academic officer at Studiosity. Judyth, we gave sort of a rundown of who you are at the top of the show, but before we launch into the conversation, anything you want to share with our audience about you and your background, just so they can get a better sense of who you are and how you came to be at Studiosity and the work that you do there.
Judyth Sachs: When I stopped being a full-time academic, when I left universities, when I wanted a life rather than a diary, I was put with the challenge, how do I talk about myself? I thought about who is Judyth. In my career, I've been an educator and a change agent. So I've been an educator in schools, I've been an educator working for a government department in Queensland, and then I'd been an educator in universities, but also as a change agent.
I started that sort of change agent framing when I worked in government developing language programs for Indigenous students. So that sense of being a change agent. And particularly working in the types of schools that I did that were very disadvantaged schools in remote areas teaching Indigenous students, I think that was the framing for me around an educator who saw the transformational power of education. And how every child, every student had the right to be successful and that I would do my best in whatever job I had to ensure that students were successful.
So I've worked in different kinds of universities. I've worked in what we call Group of Eight universities that are the same as the Ivy League. So I started my career as a lecturer at the University of Queensland doing my PhD part-time at the University of Queensland in anthropology and education. I then went to Griffith University, which was part of the second generation of universities in Australia that are euphemistically called the gum trees because invariably they're located in campuses that were once either rural or bushland settings. So they're called the gum trees.
So Griffith University was established 55 years ago to be different from the University of Queensland, which was a traditional sandstone university. And I started off a new campus there on the Gold Coast, and so I had the opportunity to start something from nothing. We started the campus working in an old primary school. We gave our lectures across the road in a cinema. And so that's where I actually learned to lecture giving lectures to accountancy, engineering students on sociology. Well, can you imagine how interested accountancy students were in sociology? Anyway, it was a challenge.
Then I moved to the University of Sydney in 1996 and I was actually the first woman professor appointed in the faculty of education at Sydney University, and was there for 12 years. Then went and had the role of pro dean in the faculty, chair of the academic board, provost chancellor learning and teaching. And then I went to Macquarie University in 1996 as senior deputy vice chancellor and provost and spent seven and a half years there.
Then I started working for KPMG, which was very interesting. You couldn't find a place that was more different. But I learned so much about higher education because I was the subject matter specialist in KPMG for this new portfolio, higher education. I went back into a university's interim deputy vice chancellor at the University of Canberra in 1999, and I realized then that I didn't want to be working 80 hours a week. And so I now have a life rather than a diary.
So the job at Studiosity is not a full-time job, but for me it's the most inspirational job that I've ever had to have as your key focus, to talk to interesting people, to work in building a business. So I've been there seven years now. To work in a company that is full of young people because I realized that when I worked in senior executive roles, they were all people my age whose face was starting to move south and had lots of roadmaps called age lines on it. So to have this as part of my getting up out of bed in the morning to work for a company that lives by its values, is very values driven, is full of smart, enthusiastic people, I've got the best of both worlds and I don't manage people.
Sarah Spreitzer: I love, Judyth, that you talked about how in your very varied and interesting career that your through-line was your interest in student success. That's really, really great. And thinking about Australia and the United States and our students, we work very closely together. We're allied in politics, we're allies in post-secondary education. We do a lot of exchanges with our students and with our faculty and our researchers. Can you talk a bit about what you see the challenges right now, not just for students in Australia, but on a global level to allow those students to be successful?
Judyth Sachs: Look, one of the things that I didn't say is I did postgraduate work in America. So I lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I'd won a scholarship from Rotary to do a postgraduate degree at Western Michigan University. So I've had the experience of being an international student. I was 24 at the time and I was living in a dorm with undergraduates. So that was a cultural experience as well.
Jon Fansmith: I'm sure.
Judyth Sachs: What are the challenges for students? And I think these are universal. They are challenges for students in the UK as much as they are for Australia and New Zealand and America. I think wellbeing is really at the top of everything, that sense of wellbeing, mental wellbeing, physical wellbeing, mental and emotional health.
I think it's also important that we think about the financial burdens that are faced on students. We also need to consider the complete change in pedagogy and student experience. And all of these are interlinked. So none of them actually are siloed, they're all interconnected. So the financial challenges create possibly the requirements for interventions about student wellbeing. The different types of pedagogy require changes in terms of thinking about diversity, how students learn, and then how to provide the support to students so that students can be successful.
So I think for some students the level of wellbeing is different from others. I think the level of debt, I mean one of the things that we used to hear a lot about from here, particularly from the previous president was student debt. Our students also have debt, but our university fees are certainly not as large as your fees. And you don't pay them upfront. You have this higher education, the HECS debt. And for some students, depending on the courses that they teach, it's at a different level. So medical students have a larger HECS debt than say educational or nursing students.
But the last government in Australia, like many places in the world, didn't believe in the value of humanities and social sciences. So students who did arts degrees or humanities degrees have a much greater HECS burden and that was purely ideological. And there's no logic to charging humanities student ... I mean, if I had been a student now, because my undergraduate degree was anthropology, sociology and ancient history, then I did a PhD in anthropology and education, my HECS debt would be enormous. I'd probably still be paying it off. Fortunately, I was this recipient of the time when the Australian government, we paid no fees for our education.
The other thing that I think is important as well that I missed is language proficiency. Because if you don't have that sort of cultural capital coming into universities and have that because you've grown up around books you know, and you've been educated in a system where the aspirations are not necessarily to go to college, to go to university, you don't have the genre of language, the register of language to be successful in university. So there is that language proficiency.
And there's also, particularly for Chinese students and also Asian students in Australia who are Asian Australians, is that pressure by families to succeed. So with international students, international students do pay rather high fees in Australia. So parents are really creating a financial burden on themselves so that their students can be successful. And so that success creates pressures on students.
And I have to say that the last university I worked in, the University of Canberra, in an interim role, we had two students commit suicide and they were international students. The impact of that both on the student body, but also on just the ecosystem of the university and the community is really significant. So I think that somehow when you're in a leadership position, you are having to manage multiple pressures and multiple expectations from both students, staff, communities, and of course government. So it's not a simple and easy question to answer.
And I guess the other thing that I'd need to think about is most of the students in Australia have some part-time work. There's a maximum amount of 20 hours that students are allowed to work. But for many students, in order to survive, they are actually exceeding that 20-hour requirement. And so they're managing this home life, work life and study life. And for many of them, particularly mature aged women who have families to look after, that's also a significant burden.
So I don't know in America, but this gig economy means that Deliveroo, Uber have these sort of food delivery services, most of the people that do that are students. You go to Canberra and I go to Canberra quite a lot to do some work with the Australian National University, a lot of the Uber drivers are postgraduate students so that they can afford to actually live a life that's not impoverished. So I guess it's complex, it's political. And we have, as educators, a responsibility to manage that in a way that serves the best interests of students, society and the institution.
Jon Fansmith: And Judyth, probably you noticed I'm nodding my head throughout almost the entirety of your answer in part because there's a lot of resonance with the American experience and especially somebody who's spent a lot of time on financial aid and the financial barriers to post-secondary education in the American model. And we don't have the differential pricing, generally, around what you're studying, but that is often brought up and discussed at schools.
But one of the things we're finding is this emphasis we've had on it's tuition and fees, what are those costs? What is the financial supports? And what you hear and what we're learning is from students, it's all these other aspects of, you mentioned the cultural fit within a campus. How do you overcome those barriers to feel part of the campus community and part of the life of the school? But also these really very real pressures about family and jobs and other things that might have economic ties to them. Certainly if you have to work a lot, that's less time studying, less time available for the kind of learning availabilities.
What have you seen that are really successful interventions though across the range of institutions you've been working at? What are ways that institutional leaders, who I understand, understandably, are very focused sometimes on those admission barriers. Once the students are on a campus, what are things you might recommend that you've seen be very successful in supporting students in all these other facets of life, knowing they're pulled in a lot of different directions, so that when they are on the campus, when they are engaged, they're able to be as successful as possible?
Judyth Sachs: Look, when I had that short period of time at the University of Canberra, I needed a project. I could go there for the interim period and just be a person that went to meetings and signed documents. I would lose the will to live. So I needed a project, and the project that I created was a project about success and belonging. Because I was very aware, particularly at Sydney University, that many students did not feel that sense of belonging. And that sense of belonging is, particularly in large universities, you're one person in a massive impersonal university. So it was really trying to personalize the experience that students had.
And I think where it happens really well is through good peer mentoring sort of programs, through very good extramural programs, but also for academics to realize that they actually have a responsibility. They have a duty of care for their students so that they have to give time to engaging with their students. But if you are teaching a large psychology class, and at University of Sydney, first year psychology was 800. And so the people that were the go-to people were postgraduate students. Now they had multiple pressures on their time as well.
And I think partly where it works well is that there are training programs for the people that do their connecting work with students to know how best to work with students, how to bring the best out of students, to be able to identify when there's an issue. So I think that it's at that frontline. But I think it's also, and this is starting to improve. So now with technology and AI, I think that there'll be opportunities for students to have some of their grievances managed much more quickly than being lost in a bureaucratic cesspit. So enrollment issues, appeal issues, and things like that will be better.
But I think also, particularly as chair of the academic board, I chaired a number of appeal committees. And when you listen to the actual life stories of students, for a middle-class person like me who who's actually lived a life of relative privilege, you hear their stories of not being able to eat because there was not enough food, of having limited sets of clothes because they couldn't afford to buy clothing. So universities do provide financial aid for students who are like that.
But I think one of the most recent things that I heard, and this was when I was talking to the vice chancellor of University of New South Wales, another one of our large elite universities. And he talked about having a food kitchen for students two days a week because he'd heard of instances where students were having to make the choice of coming to university and paying the bus fares to come to universities or eating. So one of the ways to solve that issue was to actually have this food kitchen. And that was used by a lot of students. And I think the number of students that used it really did surprise him. He instituted it at the university he was at before he came to UNSW, UTS, which also has a large number of international students.
So I think some of the interventions just need to be common sense, sensitive to the needs of students, but also to have students as front of mind. But at the same time, we're also finding that there are mental health issues amongst the academic staff. The sorts of change that's happening in universities because of financial issues means that there are a number of universities that are managing redundancies, so having to exit 800 staff. 800 staff in any institution is a huge number. So how do you manage the grief and how do you manage the challenges of people having to lose their sense of who they are? And I don't think that's been handled very well at all at a number of universities.
So if there was one thing that I would say to universities, yes, you can't continue teaching what you're doing, you can't continue as you were, but at least have in place transition processes so that people actually know where you're going, the purpose of where you're going. If people understand the vision of the institution and understand the challenges that are being placed and then they understand why they're casualties, it's a much easier head space to manage than if you are being told by your dean, "Your job's going. Your job's going. Your job's going."
And this is actually happening at a university that I do a lot of work in, the Australian National University, a vice chancellor that was brought in because the university required change. It did require change. It could no longer. But it's still an elite university and it's got a history of many of the great politicians in Australia are graduates of the ANU. The student experience at the ANU is excellent. And for some reason, ANU has captured my heart much more than the other universities that I've worked in. And there's something about it. There's something about these really smart students that go there.
Sarah Spreitzer: It's so interesting, Judyth, because so many of the things that you're talking about are things that we're also struggling with I think in the United States for our students, when you're talking about healthcare, food insecurity, when you're talking about the financial stresses. And we know for our international students, those stresses are often amplified because they don't have the same domestic support, they may not have access to the same services. Have you seen any best practices in Australia or with your Australian institutions about how to support these international students? Or any practices that you think aren't perhaps happening in the United States, but perhaps we should consider?
Judyth Sachs: International students do not have the same healthcare benefits, but they have to take out health insurance. It's part of their visa. If they don't have that healthcare that's required, and it's required by legislation, they will not get a visa to study in Australia. So healthcare is an issue. I think that it's creating a confidence in students that they are equals in terms of the student body and in terms of the services they receive. And I think in most cases, exactly the same services are available to them. There are some special services I think that are available to international students around wellbeing.
But I think that part of it is we've got to educate the international students to be help-seekers because we've got to encourage them. And part of it is, Chinese students in particular, feel that they lose face if they ask for help. So we've got to change that mindset. And I think that they are really engaging with Chinese students through Chinese student associations, through trying to integrate international students into the student body.
But sadly, I think in some cases, and I certainly saw this at Macquarie, there were accounting students that felt that they never had to really speak English and didn't have to write English because of the nature of their degree. And for me, when I heard that, I was absolutely gobsmacked, but I was furious that this was actually even allowed to happen at the faculty level, that students could pass a degree without a language proficiency.
So like America, you need an IELTS score, a language proficiency score to get in. But part of the issue there is the language proficiency score is usually gained six to 12 months before they come to the country. And so while they meet the visa requirements, by the time they get there, their language proficiency has actually gone backwards because they're not using the language.
So in terms of the question about really good practice, Deakin University have a set of modules to support good practice in supporting international students. And those modules, I had a look at them and they are practical, commonsensical. And I think it does help people understand both the nature of the problem and some solutions to come up with.
Look, there are also lots of opportunities for students, particularly at Macquarie, students would go on weekend excursions. So they'd have things that were organized by the university to see part of New South Wales, to see a part of Australia. So that sense of getting a greater appreciation of what Australia is.
I think the thing that has concerned me most of all, and I don't see any good practice anywhere, is that international students are a great cultural resource for us. They can help us understand diversity, they can help us understand intercultural differences. And if they are all ghettoed together in the same living apartments and things like that, that opportunity for that intercultural awareness and that cultural sharing is really limited.
I think also, the graduates are a source of soft power that we should use these international students as a way to connect with businesses, particularly postgraduate students when students leave the university. So there's much greater attention now to building up networks of alumni. So I, as provost and academic vice chancellor at Macquarie, on a number of occasions, went up to Hong Kong and Singapore for alumni events and for graduation. So it's that sense of, it's not that we're doing nothing, there's the possibility of doing more. And I think that training that Deakin is doing through their international modules is probably the thing that comes to mind.
And when I asked people what they were doing for international students, it was difficult to find out what was happening. So I think it's really interesting to hear the number of international students that we have. So Monash University, Australia's largest university is 86,000 students. There are 22,000 international students. University of Sydney has 75,000 students, they've got 32,000 international students. So the number of international students is significant.
And so I think part of the challenge in finding really good practice at an institutional level is actually the scale. And of course recently, the government put a cap on international students because it became a political debate that was actually specious, but it was international students that were creating the housing crisis in Australia because they took up all the apartments and things like that. Well, to use a classic Australian term that was bollocks. That that was not true, international students were not causing that. International students were not causing the increase in rates of rental rates increases.
So in many respects, they've been the cash cow so that our universities can operate. But then they've also been social scapegoats for things that are happening in the community. And one of the great impacts on universities in terms of reducing international student numbers, it's also impacting on the revenue of our universities in their ability to conduct research. So international students, we've been over-dependent on them. And while the landscape was sunny and bright, we didn't realize that we actually had to put in place, to use my metaphor, an environmental metaphor, we didn't have to build a reservoir of reserves.
Sarah Spreitzer: It's interesting that you mentioned the caps because Canada, they also had some caps put in place specifically around their provinces. And in the US, we haven't had caps yet, but we have seen changes to our visa policies and we've seen predictions of our international student enrollment dropping by about 40% in this next academic year. And I think we're all watching really closely the data that we're going to have once the academic year starts up again.
But we've had a lot of conversations with policymakers about the things that you touched on about the economic impact, not just for our institutions, but the larger economic impact for international students when they're coming here and spending money on housing and food and entertainment, but then also the cultural impact that they have on our domestic students' education.
Have you seen any of those arguments kind of break through with your policymakers? I think that they did remove the cap, and you referenced the fact that they believed that they were causing all of these issues with housing previously. How have you messaged the importance of international students to your policymakers in Australia?
Judyth Sachs: Let me say, first of all, higher education is not a vote winner. Politicians will not win an election on higher education because people see higher education as for the elite and for people who are, if they're a blue collar worker, not like them. Whereas if you have the focus around school education, particularly around at the moment, early childhood education, that's a much greater possibility for a vote winner.
So I think we're becoming more regulated in terms of higher education, and our politicians have all been the beneficiary. I mean, the great paradox to me is the politicians are the beneficiaries of a university education. And then particularly for the current minister, he is really quite anti-universities. He's in no way supporting them.
So I think the issue is universities are not speaking in one voice. They're speaking in their, we have these groupings a bit like the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters and things like that in terms of the elite, and then you've got the state universities and whatever in the US. So they're all having their own particular self-interest rather than talking as a whole in terms of speaking up the value. And they talk about the value, they talk about the value to the economy, both of international students. International students were our the fourth largest generator of revenue for the Australian economy, and it was billions of dollars. And if you take that money out of the economy, it's going to have impacts on all sorts of social policies, not just education.
So I think there are some vice chancellors that are getting some cut through, but I think that we as a sector ... Oh, see, I'm still in [inaudible 00:45:35], we as a sector. Still an academic, I just can't help myself. But that's that sense of having a clearer narrative of common good, social benefit, and transformation during really difficult times would be a way that I think would be a more effective way for the sector to engage with the politicians. And to give the politicians some ideas that are for common good rather than just self-interest would be also a way to go. So I think the narrative and the stories need to be thought about in a more effective way.
Jon Fansmith: So I will say, Sarah was basically asking you a trick question, Judyth, because we are currently trying to make the same arguments to our government about the value of institutions [inaudible 00:46:27]-
Sarah Spreitzer: I was asking for free advice, free advice, Judyth.
Jon Fansmith: Asking for a friend, right?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yes.
Jon Fansmith: So we appreciate your answer. And honestly, I think there's a lot of overlap in the approaches we're making, and I think with varying degrees of success, certainly it sounds like, both in Australia and here in the United States. But I thought one of the things that was interesting, you talked about Chinese students in particular, and Sarah's talked about some of the visa issues, restrictions on students. And we're very worried about the enrollment of international students, not just because of administration policies here in the United States, but also what seems to be a growing perception abroad of what studying in the United States looks like, and that's I think in two regards.
One is, as we've heard more rhetoric out of our government that's critical of institutions, cuts to scientific research funding and other supports for higher education. Certainly I think the rest of the world is taking notice of where we may be divesting from things that have historically been a very, very strong relationship between the federal government and colleges. But also international students are looking at the United States and are hearing the rhetoric and saying, "Maybe this isn't the place for me to go. Maybe this isn't a place where all of the issues with overcoming cultural barriers to adapt and learn and feel supported in that environment, that may not be there."
And so I'm going to exploit this opportunity I have with you, someone very familiar, not just with Australia's certainly higher education system and institutions, but very aware of international higher education perceptions and trends in that. Tell me a little bit, what does your perspective look like from Australia to the developments we've been seeing here in the United States? Is this something your colleagues are talking about or is it kind of in the background because you have a lot obviously to focus on at home?
Judyth Sachs: No, no, people are talking about it. People are making choices not to go to conferences in the US. So when you think of the enormous conferences, I used to go to the American Association for Education Research Conference and you'd have 10,000 people. So 10,000 people go to San Francisco for a conference. That's a lot of money into the economy of San Francisco. So if some of these conferences, international people aren't going to go to America, that's one of the impacts that I think will be quite interesting.
I think that people will also think about, will it be possible for me to do a research collaboration with colleagues in America if there's possibility of, out of the blue, the funding being cut or having forms of censorship in terms of what we can do and what we can write? So I think it's actually going to create other opportunities for other parts of the world to the detriment of America.
And as I said when we started our conversation, vice chancellors from Australia, and also, I know that vice chancellors from the UK are also doing it, are traveling to America, talking to people, are you interested in coming to work with us? And my sense is it's not nirvana here, it's nearly nirvana, but we've had a lot of rain lately, so it's a wet nirvana.
Jon Fansmith: We really appreciate you, Judyth, coming on, sharing your perspective, sharing your insights. It's been a delight having you. We will probably ask you to come on again. You're now going to become our de facto Australian expert. But we've really enjoyed the conversation and appreciate you making the time.
Judyth Sachs: Can I just say that the presidents that I've spoken to all have that hope, all have that student focus. And so the presidents of your universities, the ones that have responded to my request to talk to them, have been absolutely fantastic. So Ron Roshan from Cal State at Fullerton, inspirational. And some of the small liberal arts presidents, inspirational. And the work that they're doing in their communities with their students, inspirational. So you've got the bones there. It's just making sure that the bones don't rot.
Jon Fansmith: And thank you also for the reminder. You have a wonderful podcast that people should be tuning into. I've been listening off and on over the last week or two to different episodes and would highly recommend people who are interested in dotEDU, I think they would have a lot to learn and enjoy from listening to your podcast as well. So thanks again, Judyth, for joining us. Thanks, Sarah, as always for co-hosting with me. And thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back with another episode soon.
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