China has cut 45 partnerships with Australian universities as part of a scaling-down of global higher education cooperation. Officials say the move is aimed at phasing out resource-poor projects that fail to attract enough students to make them financially viable.
The Ministry of Education, China`s Ministry of Education, said this week that 229 partnerships between China and overseas education institutions have been terminated by more than one fifth of its 2342 projects, about half of which is a bachelor`s degree. Australia`s cut-off partnership ranked second, with 45, second only to the 60 in the UK. About 25 universities in the United States have been affected.
China has also closed five co-run schools, although this does not affect any Australian schools.
According to university officials, the cuts are not expected to have a wide impact on the number of Chinese students coming to Australia, as many courses expired a few years ago because they simply failed to attract students. Despite growing concerns about Beijing`s impact on academic freedom at overseas universities, some senior university lecturers in China say the cuts appear to be economic rather than politically motivated.
Chinese university lecturers associated with the Australian Financial Review newspaper say many projects with foreign institutions have been struggling because they have been unable to attract excellent professors from China or overseas and lack the resources to do so. And it is difficult to attract qualified students.
The Impact of the Key Universities in Australia
Many of Australia`s key universities are on the list of the affected master`s degree programmes, including five of the eight. The cut includes the partnership between the University of Western Australia and the Shanghai Maritime University, the University of Sydney and the Shanghai Fudan University, the University of New South Wales and the Beijing University of Science and Technology, the University of Monash and the University of Technology. There are also the University of Melbourne and the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Other affected Australian universities include James Cook University, Sydney University of Science and Technology, Deacon University, Magory University, La Trobe University, Woolengon University, Swaben University and Tasmania University.
About half of the projects cut off involve universities in China`s Heilongjiang province. One university lecturer said the courses failed to attract high-quality students because the fees were too expensive. Domestic master`s degrees charge only 45,000 yuan (9130 Australian dollars), but overseas partnerships charge one hundred thousand yuan (20,299 Australian dollars).
Zhang, of Shanghai University of Foreign Economics and Trade, said one of the cut-off partnerships had not recruited any students in years.
The partnership began in the 1990s to satisfy Chinese students who wanted to experience studying abroad. Professors from overseas universities used to go to China to teach courses, and Chinese students were able to complete some of the courses in overseas universities.
Nearly 134,000 Chinese students attend the top universities in Australia, which are heavily dependent on the hundreds of millions of income they bring about each year. As of December 2017, Chinese students accounted for 38 per cent of the number of students enrolled in higher education in Australia.
