Once again I'm reading about a drop in international student enrolments and can't help but think this is linked to the rising Australian dollar. Unfortunately parents of foreign students and foreign students themselves may not have access to buy large amounts of Australian dollar to mitigate this rise.
Can a solution to this be found by pegging the price of education in Australia to a fixed amount of foreign currency? For instance can education authorities analyse the average cost of education in Australia over a 10 year period, and fix the price in the mid band? Say it costs between 30000 Chinese Yuan and 50000 Chinese Yuan over a 10 year period, can authorities fix the price at 40000 Yuan over the 3 year course? Obviously this is oversimplistic, but i'm sure their are several market mechanisms that can be used to mitigate risk for students. Insurance schemes could be one of them and large subscription based education fund could be another. There are many possibilities. Ensuring stability in this industry is important. Having students quit half way due to the rising dollar would be a disaster.
Please leave a comment to discuss.
No comments:
Post a Comment