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Immigration Daily News Education industry far more regulated than most. Do you agree?
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Education industry far more regulated than most. Do you agree?
The head of the government-ordered ‘major research and scoping project into a quality framework for education agencies’ says that ‘the $16 billion international education industry is far more regulated than most’ and ‘Australia already has the mechanisms in place to ensure overall quality assurance in a highly regulated industry.’
Taking issue with ABCs Four Corners investigation, “Degrees of Deception” which revealed fraud by major education brokers in China, Phil Honeywood, executive director of the International Education Association of Australia has risen to the defence of education brokers asserting that the ABCs report and views of the ICAC are wrong and unbalanced.
“It is complete nonsense to suggest that such agents are unregulated.” Mr Honeywood wrote in an opinion piece published in The Australian, today.
“In China, for example, all education agents must be officially licensed and pay a bond to the government of two million renminbi ($420,000). If any Chinese student claims they received wrong or negligent advice from their agent, it is highly possible for that agent to lose both their licence and their bond.
“Equally, if any Australian university becomes aware of fraudulent practices by one of their agents, there are strong imperatives for them to cancel their agency agreement” states Mr Honeywood.
The article goes no further to say, why then these measures have not already been taken; why the government has ordered a major review of the education brokering industry; and why the fraud uncovered by ABCs hidden cameras in some of China’s biggest education brokers looked like routine practice.
The ABC’s report and ICAC contends there is widespread collusion in fraud that benefitted the education brokers, universities and students. So the question is: who is losing out here and who is going to make the complaint? Furthermore, is Australia to rely on China’s regulatory framework to keep fraud and corruption at bay and protect its $16.5 billion education industry?
For some reason the ABC ignored Mr Honeywood’s input to them in its report – the ABC “did not consider it worthy of mention’ as he put it.
Given all this, do you think we’re likely to see any major change in the ‘major research and scoping project’ of the education brokering industry which both the ABC and ICAC have labelled as being in a ‘sorry state’?
Comments
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Friday, 24 April 2015Actually the program simply confirmed many aspects of what I have come across far too often.
Inappropriate courses "sold" to people who had no hope of completing them (with the "edu agent" getting a kickback) - others where a course was "sold" when the applicant already had a profession/occupation that was eligible for a visa (but then - there's no kickbacks if they don't do a course!).
The harm and financial cost put on applicants unnecessarily NEED to be exposed.
By the way - it's easy to say "if any Australian university becomes aware of fraudulent practices by one of their agents, there are strong imperatives for them to cancel their agency agreement”.
However - what is what is an "imperative"?
A question not put is "why do universities exclude RMA's from the process"?
Is it to eliminate the accompanying regulation and (possible) consequence?
Immigration blog
The ABC story goes back to 2007-8-9 and jumps to the present. Of the hundreds of thousands of overseas students that have come through Australia, it zooms in on a few, throws up some very questionable statistics about lowered standards being related to these students, and then concludes fuzzily about oversees students either being cheats or being cheated. I found the program very unsettling not for what it said about universities as much as what it said about a journalistic exercise produced by what claims to be our best news channel.
As for RMAs, you can't expect too much intelligent coverage about an industry that virtually no one understands or actually cares about--including the politicians who created the laws that in turn created the industry or the regulators who come and go like fast food fads.
The education agents are doing a job that is still largely unannounced and unknown in Australia. Australians seem to think that the overseas students just appear on our universities' doorsteps unannounced, buy an education process leading to a diploma or degree, and then either disappear to their home countries or stay here--inexplicably except to RMAs, a few academics and the students themselves.
ABC could have done better, a lot better. Maybe they deserved the budget cuts the current government made. I certainly would not reward them for this vaguely ethnocentric, vaguely racist, vaguely anti-intellectual smear job. I say 'vaguely' because the specific examples sited in the show had almost no explanation of the real and enormous worlds of education or migration.