E&OE
OLIVER PETERSON: At the moment, the 39 Australian vice-chancellors have been in Perth for meetings and engagements with industry, government and other stakeholder partners. Great opportunity to have a chat to the university’s Australia Chief Executive Officer Luke Sheehy. He is standing opposite me here in the 6PR Studios. Good day, Luke.
LUKE SHEEHY: Good day, Oliver, how are you?
OLIVER PETERSON: Has it been a good meeting?
LUKE SHEEHY: It has been, and we’ve got some more meetings tomorrow. Thanks to the University of Western Australia for hosting us and looking forward to continuing our visit to this great state of Western Australia.
OLIVER PETERSON: Which one of the Perth unis is your favorite?
LUKE SHEEHY: Look, I’ve got a soft spot for Curtin only because I used to, in my old job, report to the vice-chancellor there. But I mean Edith Cowan, you’ve got Notre Dame down in Freo, obviously, and the great University of Western Australia, and I can never forget Murdoch. It’s a great university down in south Perth.
OLIVER PETERSON: See we’ve got five, as you just rattled off there. Have we got too many in Perth these days? Because there was a bit of talk from the state government about thinking and seeing whether or not the unis could perhaps merge.
LUKE SHEEHY: Look, lots of chatter about mergers and obviously it’s not immune to the rest of the country. South Australia is going through a big process where they’ve made a call on merging some of their unis. I think that’s a matter for the government of Western Australia in consultation with the vice-chancellors and the communities of the universities here in Western Australia. Really important to remember, Oliver, the Australian government has told us by 2050 we need a million more students going to university than we do today. So, our university system in Australia needs to grow. Why? Because we’ve got a teacher shortage, we’ve got a shortage of engineers, we’ve got a shortage of nurses and all of those great professional people and skills that come out of university. So, whatever you do as a West Australian community with the size and makeup of the universities…to remember kids and people need those skills coming out of universities and they need to be growing.
OLIVER PETERSON: There’s a fair bit in that. You look at the entry into a university and you look at what high school students are sitting with the ATAR, and I think the average around Australia now is about 50 per cent of students sit the ATAR, but in WA it’s lower. It’s somewhere around only a third of students actually sit for the ATAR. Luke, is it part of a wider conversation about education and reform and those entry points, which the traditional obvious way was to finish school, get ATAR, go to uni, but perhaps there has to be another pathway into university. That’s something you want to consider to do.
LUKE SHEEHY: So many different pathways into university and with more than half of the new jobs created in the Australian economy requiring a university degree, more and more people will come back to university throughout the course of their working life to get the skills they need for a career in a modern economy. So, we don’t always think about university entrance as school leavers, and I think that’s a really important thing to remember. Also, the great state of Western Australia, you’ve got lots of jobs, you’ve got lots of opportunity here. In similar parts of the country like Queensland, we’re seeing some students go straight into work after school and that works for them, but we find a lot of people need a pathway into university later in their lives when they want to do something else or get a more professional skill to get a different type of career. The government’s been doing some really interesting work to help that, including these new fee free uni preparatory courses. Edith Cowan has been doing these for years and they’re a great free opportunity for people to get a taste of university. Maybe they didn’t get that pathway a couple of years ago and they can do it later in their life and see if they’re ready for uni.
OLIVER PETERSON: Yeah, and I think that that’s important because that message asking a 16 or 17-year-old boy or girl who’s becoming a man or a woman, whether or not they want to get into uni and get on with the rest of their life and do a particular degree and therefore you’re down a path or a rabbit hole of, oh, I’ve got a job in finance and that’s what I need to do – finance, finance, finance. When you look at it now, Australians are going to have multiple jobs in multiple careers across their lives. So, it doesn’t mean you have to make that decision at such a young age and stick to it.
LUKE SHEEHY: That’s absolutely right and when I’m talking to students in high school, I always say, don’t put so much pressure on yourself, uni is an option for you right throughout your career. We’ve got 80-year-olds doing PhDs in our universities, and we’ve got people going back to do professional degrees, retraining throughout their lives to change course. We’ll strengthen the skills that they have got so they can get on with their career. We already know that in Australia we have over a hundred thousand deficit. We need more than a hundred thousand nurses by the end of this decade. So, we’re going to be looking for people to come back and retrain and do great courses like nursing, similar in teaching, as I said before, similar in engineering, other really key professions. Don’t put all that pressure on yourself when you’re in Year 12. Often learning about the world growing up, I went back to uni when I was 28 after a couple of years in the workplace and it’s the best decision I made, and I was more mature and better equipped to succeed at university at that point.
OLIVER PETERSON: Talking of that at any age group, when you get into university, how are our universities performing at the moment, Luke? And from a financial point of view, there seemed to have been a lot of pressure on our unis, particularly through the COVID years. Staff had to be let go from a number of universities. Learning started to change a lot more, online courses had to be undertaken by a lot of students. And have you now seen that those students have come back to the campus, come back into the classroom? Or have we been able to evolve or change or adapt with technology to be able to offer university both online and in person?
LUKE SHEEHY: I think it’s really important to think about what the modern university experience is like, and it is for nearly a million Australian students a mix of online, a mix of on-campus and a combination of the two. That’s important because technology changes everything we do. So, technology is here to stay in terms of online delivery and multimodal delivery at universities. That’s really important. Coming back to your point about universities. Over the last decade, we’ve seen billions of dollars ripped out of university funding, and universities have sought to replace that government funding with international student revenues and other revenues. And we’ve had a big debate over the last 12 months with both sides of politics on how many international students we can let in to this country. I know there’s a big appetite with Premier Cook and the government here to let more international students come to Perth. There’s plenty of room, plenty of opportunity to build student housing to accommodate them beautiful new campuses like the city ECU campus coming online. So, I think places like Perth are ready, willing and able to take international students and one of the best things, I was talking to Study Perth today and they said people who come to Perth, they love to stay and build their lives here in Western Australia because it’s such a beautiful place to be. So, attracting talented people from right across, not only just Australia, but from nearly 140 countries across the world is a really important part of what we do. Why do we do it? Because it helps us subsidise the experience of Australian students as well as those international students. Australians are getting a world-class education because of the fact we have international students coming to this country.
OLIVER PETERSON: We had…yesterday who said he came out as an international student 18 years ago, has built a life. He loves it, thinks it’s sensational, and has been here for 18 years. But as you say, we’ve been through an election, and we do have a reelected Albanese Government who wants to bring in international student caps. And so did the Opposition? Will that put further pressure on our universities then do we need to actually be growing that international student markets to be able to prop up the financial position of the universities, as you said before there, Luke, because you don’t have that taxpayer funded revenue stream anymore.
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, I’ve said the overwhelming election result for the Labor Party gives us an opportunity to reset and have a pretty fair dinkum debate with the government about what the size and shape of our universities are, similar to what you are having with the state government here about the number of universities you have. International students, international education is a great Australian success story. It’s driven the Australian economy, particularly out in the eastern states, they would’ve been in recession but for international students coming and investing in our country and spending money and bringing their families here to visit as well. It’s a really important part of what we do in terms of how we fund our universities. But critically, it helps make us friends and we know, I think there’s a huge connection between the Malaysian community and the people of Perth because so many people from Malaysia have come to study in the great city of Perth over the last four decades. We want to see that continue because it helps make us friends and it helps us be a stronger country in our region.
OLIVER PETERSON: The issue at the moment that we’re all experiencing across Australia in housing crisis is how do you free out more homes for the people who are here at the moment in a rental squeeze, has been under one per cent or thereabouts in Perth for a long time. International students though, do they occupy much of that available market or is there from the universities that accommodation that is available to international students that probably local renters look at and go, no, that’s not for me?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, what we know is the Reserve Bank has told us and leading economists and banks have said that we have a construction crisis, a housing construction problem in Australia. We don’t need to wreck a world-class education sector to fix a construction problem. Only six per cent of the private rental market is international students and in areas where there are big universities and particularly metropolitan regions in this country, metropolitan local government areas, occupancy rates are higher than they are in other parts of the country. So, we’ve got to kind of move on from this fake debate about international students…
OLIVER PETERSON: …international students being made the scapegoat in this process.
LUKE SHEEHY: …absolutely. And we’ve made that point pretty clear. And in the election, we came out swinging against bad policies. We are all for building more houses for Australians. We need more housing. We are building less than we built before the pandemic. We know that’s a problem and a pipeline problem for the Australian economy. If we wreck international education as a major income earner for the country, while we do that, we are going to have a double whammy of reducing our economic growth and of course not doing anything about housing.
OLIVER PETERSON: So, punish the tertiary education sector for those sorts of policies. If there was a reduction though in international students, would there be more places made available or opportunities for domestic students?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, in Australia, a lot of domestic students do stay at home. I am sure it must annoy their parents that they’re a lot longer than they expected. But we want to see all young Australians have the opportunity to get into housing, be it when they’re a student, or be it after they’ve graduated, they start a family.
OLIVER PETERSON: But in other places like universities, would that open up other courses for domestic students?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, no. The reality is international students compliment what our core mission is, and that is to educate Australians. They never take any places away from Australians.
OLIVER PETERSON: So, what’s happening in the United States suspending all student visa processing, it’s affecting Australian students at Harvard first and foremost, wasn’t it Luke?
LUKE SHEEHY: Oliver, I’ve been really, really shocked about not only President Trump’s and his administration’s approach to Harvard, but overnight looking at suspending all international student visas into the USA. This is an alarming trend. America was built on migrants and being open to the world as Australia. Both countries have built our success on being open to the world. This is really, really deeply concerning. Obviously, the Australian government will be making representations directly to the US government, but for universities in Australia, it is a sobering message that a country with such shared values like America is doing this to international students. It’s pretty scary.
OLIVER PETERSON: And vice versa, aren’t they looking at taking some of the funding out of Australian universities with sort of co pros with the United States and their educational institutions?
LUKE SHEEHY: The American government spends almost half a billion dollars on collaborating with Australian world-class researchers, and we’ve seen some attempt to withdraw that funding in some programs. But the good news is that Americans don’t do this for charitable reasons. They are paying for Australian research and know-how, because they need it, particularly in areas of agriculture, health and defense research. I’m pretty confident they’ll continue to draw on our world-class expertise. But it is a really worrying trend what we’re seeing out of the US in trade, in the approach to international students, and of course collaborative research. Research is a thing that you need to do globally. You can’t do it in isolation. Australia does so much great research with partners across the world. We want to make sure that continues. One of the things I’m doing next week is I’m going over to Brussels and talking to the Europeans because there is a multi-billion-dollar fund for collaborative research called Horizon Europe. Australia has said no to it so far, but New Zealand has just signed up, so has Canada. Post-Brexit, so has Britain. I want to make the case both to Europe but also to the Australian government. We should sign up to a reliable collaborative partner in the European Union.
OLIVER PETERSON: A few challenges ahead, Luke, thanks for dropping by the studio today. Great to meet you.
LUKE SHEEHY: Great to be with you.
ENDS
